May 2023
As someone who builds and maintains cloud infrastructure, I have always been leery from a security perspective of giving 3rd party services, such as CI/CD platforms, access to the resources. All the service vendors claim to take stringent precautions and implement foolproof processes, but still, vulnerabilities getexploited and errors happen. Therefore, my preference is to use tools […]
May 2023
I have been digging into how Kubernetes uses networking on Linux and came across Linux virtual server (LVS). LVS is a kernel-level feature that provides a virtual, network front end. The tool to manage LVS is ipvsadm. The tool is usually not available by default and must be installed. It is possible to use yum […]
Apr 2023
One benefit of public cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) is that it allows startups and established companies to quickly set up and start using resources. There are also a wide range of server types for many of those resources that require computing power, such as virtual servers, managed databases or caching. Some […]
Back in my C++ days, I knew most of the ins and outs of make, and makefiles and sub-makefiles. I could do pretty much whatever I needed to. Of course, in complicated projects the files start looking really ugly inside. Then for Java there was ant, which tidied up all the targets and dependencies in structured […]
Oct 2021
Sometimes I wonder whether I can still hack it in this industry. Like many people of my vintage, my programming language progression was Fortran, Cobol, Basic, Pascal, Unix shell script, C++, Java, Javascript and Python. I stopped there. So I did not learn Go, Rust, Erlang, Scala, Kotlin, Node or Typescript and while I’ve started […]
Jul 2021
One of my team members is retiring, and as we were talking about their tenure with the company, “We did a LOT!” they said. That got me looking back at the past 2 years, and I started listing some of the changes and accomplishments that happened, first while I was leading the engineering team as […]
Feb 2021
When people think of DevOps, they likely think of delivery of code into production. Microsoft, Amazon and DevOps.com all mention delivery in the first paragraph of their definitions of DevOps. However, code has to be developed and tested before it can be shipped. That requires an environment where developers can integrate their code, an environment where QA teams can perform […]
Jan 2021
If you want to increase the disk space of an EC2 volume, this AWS page mentions a command called growpart. However, if you have an old (circa 2015) EC2 instance that was initially a Ubuntu 16.04 release, the command may not be available. The command is part of a package called cloud-utils. So: sudo apt […]
Jul 2020
Recently I was playing around with setting up an AWS Transit Gateway. The objective was to route traffic from multiple VPCs through a single NAT gateway to the company network. The solution had to work if the origin VPCs were in different AWS accounts. Part I: NAT Gateway I took it in stages. I first […]
Oct 2018
As a Mac user with concerns about privacy and data security, I have used a personal firewall on my laptop for many years. The specific one I use is Little Snitch. Normally I don’t name products but I like it so much that I have no problem making this exception. The way it works is […]