Start Automating Public Cloud Deployments with Infrastructure-as-Code
One of my readers sent me a series of “how do I get started with…” questions including:
I’ve been doing networking and security for 5 years, and now I am responsible for our cloud infrastructure. Anything to do with networking and security in the cloud is my responsibility along with another team member. It is all good experience but I am starting to get concerned about not knowing automation, IaC, or any programming language.
No need to worry about that, what you need (to start with) is extremely simple and easy-to-master. Infrastructure-as-Code is a simple concept: infrastructure configuration is defined in machine-readable format (mostly text files these days) and used by a remediation tool like Terraform that compares the actual state of the deployed infrastructure with the desired state as defined in the configuration files, and makes changes to the actual state to bring it in line with how it should look like.
Start Automating Public Cloud Deployments with Infrastructure-as-Code
One of my readers sent me a series of “how do I get started with…” questions including:
I’ve been doing networking and security for 5 years, and now I am responsible for our cloud infrastructure. Anything to do with networking and security in the cloud is my responsibility along with another team member. It is all good experience but I am starting to get concerned about not knowing automation, IaC, or any programming language.
No need to worry about that, what you need (to start with) is extremely simple and easy-to-master. Infrastructure-as-Code is a simple concept: infrastructure configuration is defined in machine-readable format (mostly text files these days) and used by a remediation tool like Terraform that compares the actual state of the deployed infrastructure with the desired state as defined in the configuration files, and makes changes to the actual state to bring it in line with how it should look like.
Managing network devices with Golang using Netrasp
Have you let the Gophers into your network yet? With Netrasp, you can let them roam wild. Netrasp is a Go package that connects to network devices with SSH to allow you to send commands and configuration to them. The rasping sound as your network gets screenscraped would come from Netrasp. For people coming from the Python world, you could compare Netrasp to Netmiko. Continue reading
Troubleshooting steps
Introduction
Troubleshooting network issues is one of the common skills of every network engineer. And usually, we don’t think about it. We don’t study and train this skill especially. I tell about troubleshooting as a formal process. We just get experience from our daily routine or follow company workflow. I will try to formalize some basic notions. Hope it will be helpful.
Of course, it depends on the situation and business constraints but when we try to resolve some issue we should follow the next steps:
Preparing -> Information-gathering -> Isolating -> Resolving -> Escalating
Let's look at every step.
Preparing
Every network has infrastructure tools (monitoring, inventory, etc), but we should continuously improve and keep up to date them. Try to develop and integrate a new one. This stack of tools is our source of truth. If we have it, we can easily fetch a full amount of information before, during, and after problems. It’s an enormous topic but without these tools, we can’t successfully troubleshoot our network.
Mandatory tools:
- Syslog (at least simple Syslog server. And good to have e.g. Elastic stack)
- Alarm management system (e.g. Zabbix)
- Statistics collector (e. Continue reading
Developers, Developers, Developers: Welcome to Developer Week 2021
Runtimes, serverless, edge compute, containers, virtual machines, functions, pods, virtualenv. All names for things developers need to go from writing code to running code. It’s a painful reality that for most developers going from code they’ve written to code that actually runs can be hard.
Excruciatingly, software development is made hard by dependencies on modules, by scaling, by security, by cost, by availability, by deployment, by builds, and on and on. All the ugly reality of crystallizing thoughts into lines of code that actually run, successfully, somewhere, more than once, non-stop, and at scale.
And so… Welcome to Developer Week 2021!
Like we have done in previous Innovation Weeks (such as Security Week or Privacy Week), we will be making many (about 20) announcements of products and features to make developers’ lives easier. And by easy I mean removing the obstacles that stop you, dear developer, from writing code and deploying it so it scales to Internet size.
And Cloudflare Workers, our platform for software developers who want to deploy Internet-facing applications that start instantly and scale Internetly, has been around since 2017 (or to put it in perspective, since iPhone 8) and helping developers code and deploy in seconds Continue reading
Worth Reading: Fail-Fast is Failing… Fast
Here’s an interesting fact: cloud-based stuff often refuses to die; it might become insufferably slow, but would still respond to the health checks. The usual fast failover approach used in traditional high-availability clusters is thus of little use.
For more details, read the Fail-Fast is Failing… Fast ACM Queue article.
Worth Reading: Fail-Fast is Failing… Fast
Here’s an interesting fact: cloud-based stuff often refuses to die; it might become insufferably slow, but would still respond to the health checks. The usual fast failover approach used in traditional high-availability clusters is thus of little use.
For more details, read the Fail-Fast is Failing… Fast ACM Queue article.
AWS Cloud Development Kit: Now I Get It
The AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) is an "open source software development framework to define your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages". When CDK launched in 2019, I remember reading the announcement and thinking, "Ok, AWS wants their own Terraform-esque tool. No surprise given how popular Terraform is." Months later, my friend and colleague Matt M. was telling me how he was using CDK in a project he was working on and how crazy cool it was.
I finally decided to give CDK a go for one of my projects. Here is what I discovered.
A Near 2 year Part Time Project Done – A sustaining Model!
Ever since I got interested in plants getting some sort of metrics has been a part time obsession.
Iteration 1 – No wireless and no outdoor model with always on usb power.
Iteration 2 – Learnt about ESP8266 microcontroller and deep sleep feature
Iteration 3 – Saving battery through deep sleep and battery power instead of usb mains, Adding ESP32 Microcontroller.
Iteration 4 – Study about Lithium Ion batteries
Iteration 5 – Making model wireless and usb free power, running on batteries
Iteration 6 – Containerising the entire software and integration with AWS and Telnyx
Iteration 7 – Making the model sustaining on itself through solar power and making it weather resistant
This completes an End to End IOT Model with a micro controller , a moisture sensor and two lithium ION batteries which get charged based on a small solar panel. Am going to extend this to LoRa Wan and will try to achieve ultra low power long distance.
The idea is that there is an allotment 6 kms from the place I live and I will see if AWS and LoRa Wan Supports me for protocol needs.
Docker containers associated with this project
Worth Reading: Data Manipulation in Jinja2
Ansible and Jinja2 are not an ideal platform for data manipulation, but sometimes it’s easier to hack together something in Jinja2 than writing a Python filter. In those cases, you might find the Data Model Transformation with Jinja2 by Philippe Jounin extremely useful.
Worth Reading: Data Manipulation in Jinja2
Ansible and Jinja2 are not an ideal platform for data manipulation, but sometimes it’s easier to hack together something in Jinja2 than writing a Python filter. In those cases, you might find the Data Model Transformation with Jinja2 by Philippe Jounin extremely useful.
Notes on Aviatrix
Miscellaneous notes on Aviatrix.
Usually updated on Fridays.
New and updated notes are placed at the top.
Updating the Aviatrix Controller IAM Policy:
When deploying the Aviatrix controller in AWS for the first time, the AWS CloudFormation template that launched your controller may not have the most current IAM policy definitions for the IAM roles it creates for the controller to use. To remedy this, right after your controller is launched and you’ve logged on for the first time, do the following:
- Define your Primary access account. Go to Onboarding > AWS > Create Primary Access Account. This is the AWS account that your controller lives in.
- Now go to Accounts > Access Accounts. Highlight the Primary access account you just created and click “Update Policy”. This will update the IAM policy applied to the IAM roles your controller will be using to the latest and greatest.
How to use an AWS ACM Certificate with your Aviatrix controller:
To apply an ACM public certificate to your UI sessions with the Aviatrix controller you’ll need to use a Load Balancer and attach your certificate to it. Here’s what I did:
- Create a Network Load Balancer (NLB)
- Create a TLS:443 listener on Continue reading
After Two Decades, the Party Is Ready for the IXP in El Salvador
The history of El Salvador’s Internet exchange point (IXSal) is perhaps the longest and most complex, beginning at the end of the last century, in 1999, explains its founder, Lito Ibarra, with a smile. “It started out as a utopia after I started hearing about the experiences of other countries.” Ibarra wrote proposals and received […]
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