Automation

This part of the challenge will cover the setup of the infrastructure at AWS with Terraform, and since I’m a fan of Python I will use/learn FastAPI for web front server effect, plus a picture embedded in the served web page will come from a secured S3 bucket. All of this was part of this great training course Networking in Public Cloud Deployments. We will create all the basic infrastructure from your PC just to follow the training course and gain the fundamental knowledge that we will need for what is to come. ...

I found my next challenge while I was defining the Lab exercises for Networking in Public Cloud Deployments training course. Honestly, I didn’t know much about what was ahead, but I had a great learning idea and the will to go through the challenge. I’m not saying that this is correct nor complete, is my first run exploring the whole thing, so I’m just saying “hey! I can do this!, and this is the Proof of Concept. ...

In the previous post we set up the infrastructure at AWS and we stored the states at GitLab. Now let’s go for the most fun part, integrate everything. We will modify a security group to allow HTTP access to the FastAPI app, and we will have all kinds of notifications and requests for approvals sent to Slack. Every step will be logged and stored in the form of messages in Slack and in a DevOps fashion at GitLab: terraform states, artifacts (which are specifics output that you want to store), logs for each run of the pipeline, etc. This will give you incredible traceability of your IaC. ...

Not so long ago a customer asked me for help on how to block IP addresses on their regional firewalls infrastructure. They needed a solution urgently, since lately there were some severe attacks on other companies in the region, and they didn’t want to be “on the news” too. Having a network engineer available 7x24 to block IP addresses on all the firewalls is not timewise efficient nor effective. It is simply not realistic to get him to work at any time (like midnight) and configure everything in less than 1 hour without errors and back and forths while chatting in the middle of the crisis with the rest of the organization. ...