Improving IAM policies

Security is a shared responsibility As you might have read in my previous posts, public cloud itself should be considered as very secure. For major cloud providers such as AWS security is key. Security incidents would destroy AWS’ business so they are fully committed to prevent this from happening. Their almost unlimited access to security talent, extensive knowledge, years of experience, enormous budget, benefit of building things from scratch etc etc are indicators that security is serious business. Continue reading

High-performance computing on AWS

How does High-Performance Computing differs from regular computing? Today’s server hardware is powerfull enough to execute most compute tasks. With common compute resources most (serial) computing challenges can be solved. However, some tasks are very complex and require a different approach. Think of cases that require improved speed and efficiency, ability to handle large datasets and flexibility etc. For this HPC will bring massive parallel computing, cluster and workload managers and high-performance components to the table. Continue reading

Amazon Linux 2023

Earlier this month AWS has released Amazon Linux 2023, in short AL2023. Amazon Linux is a Linux distribution maintained by AWS. It is no suprise that the main purpose of this distribution is an optimized experience for running on AWS as it comes with features and intergration with AWS-specific tools. Besides an Amazon Linux Image the distribution is also offered as an container image. AL2023 is the last generation of Amazon Linux, the successor of the initial version Amazon Linux and Amazon Linux 2. Continue reading

Getting started with sustainability

Sustainability is an important topic. This is not without a reason, since sustainability is key in preserving our planet. The combined world of sustainability and cloud is getting more and more traction. The investements pay off: we get more capabilities to work with and now it’s time to start harvesting. The urgency is also there. ICT, including cloud, is responsible for 3% of the global greenhouse gasses emissions. We, as consumers of cloud resource, easily have impact since making changes to your cloud environment can be done easily (e. Continue reading

The five common mistakes on S3

In general the cloud object store Amazon S3 is pretty straightforward to use, but mistakes are easily made. The service itself is proven to be secure (“security of the cloud”), reliable and performant. However, misconfiguration by the owner of the S3 buckets can give a totally different experience (“security in the cloud”). In this blog the five most common mistakes will be addressed as a learning experience. 1. Leaky S3 buckets Never configure your S3 bucket to allow direct public access to your S3 buckets. Continue reading

Configure OpenID Connect for GitLab and AWS

We do encounter a mix of DevOps tools being used in cloud project. For reasons we do prefer to work with AWS native tools and services. One of the reasons (but certainly not limited to that) for that opinion is that native tools provide seamless integration with the fundamentals of AWS itself. Think of tight integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) or AWS CloudTrail. In AWS it’s common to assign roles to resources. Continue reading

Limiting access using geographic restrictions

The world is on fire. We’re heading towards - or exactly it already is - a humanitarian disaster in Ukraine. We’ve all seen the heartbreaking footage from the war. Thousands of homeless people fighting and fearing for their lives. I’ve written this blog to help. I do know that a large number of government websites are hosted on AWS. The conflict between Ukraine and Russia is expanding with cyber warfare. There is fighting on the ground, but also online. Continue reading