davethemaker

Category: Virtual Computing

  • Data Protection w/ Encryption (KMS)

    One of the critical components of ensuring that data remains confidential, and other critical aspects such as nonrepudiation and authentication, is through the use of encryption methodologies. In this post, I’m going to walk through configuring AWS Encryption using the CLI, creating an encryption key using KMS (which will be used to encrypt and decrypt…

  • Patches! Using the Patch Manager ( w/ AWS Systems Manager)

    One of tthe challenges of mitigating vulnerabilities and building a robust defense against potential threats against networked systems includes making sure that OS and app software is up to date and patched against known vulnerabilities and security risks. Especially if there are a lot of instances involved! It’s so easy to spin up new EC2…

  • Network Hardening Using Amazon Inspector and AWS Systems Manager

    During my graduate studies in Information Systems, I was introduced to cybersecurity and became really interested in it. Since then, I’ve been focusing on learning cloud services and IaC, but I’m interested in pulling the security aspect in as well. To that effect, I’m going to be using Amazon Inspector and AWS Systems Manager to…

  • Deploying Container with Fargate

    Building on my previous post where I created a docker container and pushed it to Docker Hub, I’m going to be using the AWS ECS service to deploy said container, and I’ll be using the Fargate service. In ECS, I create a cluster named ‘inspiring_pictures_container’, and am a little perplexed because I don’t see the…

  • From local to EC2: Docker Apache Web App

    I’ve been following a tutorial which describes how to use containers within the AWS environment- it’s well done (Cantrill) but it does require the user (me) to simply download a pre-packaged container-ready file as part of a Cloud Formation deployment. That works for the intention of the author – provide a good, birds-eye view of…

  • AWS S3 + GitHub Actions (CI/CD Workflow)

    I’m studying for the AWS Architect Associate’s exam, so am learning about the different services in detail. My studies today took me deeper into the world of S3 buckets, but I thought that it would be good to get some hands-on experience at the same time. So, I purchased a domain, which I had previously…

  • Not cookies..Baking an AMI!

    In a previous post I manually spun up an EC2 instance and then installed and configured an Apache server and MariaDB to run a WP instance. It was useful for learning purposes, and as a reference of the benefits of automation! In this post, I’m going to be baking an AMI image, that is, creating…

  • How *not* to use AWS services: monolithic WP installation on single EC2

    I’ve been working with Terraform in creating an EC2 instance and provisioning it within a single AZ and subnet. I haven’t instantiated any scaling groups yet, though that’s on the near horizon, which is, along with an ELB, important for failover reasons and minimizing risks. In this post, I’m going to get some hands-on experience…

  • EC2 + SG + Key-Pair with AWS CLI

    These are the steps that I took to spin up an EC2 instance within the us-west-2 region, utilizing the Amazon Linux 2 AMI and t2.micro instance type. First, you have to make sure that you have the AWS CLI installed and configured on your local machine. Second, find the Amazon Linux 2 AMI IDs that…

  • EC2 Architecture via AWS Console

    For better understanding building out AWS architecture, and to include my using an architectural diagram to guide my efforts (bear with me, this is my fledgling attempt so it’s a bit rough!). Here’s what I will be building out – a basic architecture supporting the spinning up of an EC2 instance: The steps I plan…