Some time ago I was asked for help to develop a “simple and quick” Python script to monitor the status of a Linux service. They were in the middle of a deployment and they needed something fast. They added, keep the result in a JSON file with the date, serve the directory with HTTP for quick view, and finally post it to ELK for graphics. Ok, this looks simple part by part, but the sum ends up in a very complete solution at the same time! ...
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. ...
Even if you don’t fully understand what is an API, it is really easy to leverage their power to have some useful information directly sent to a collaboration platform and receive it on your mobile or PC in real-time. All the tools in use are Free: Python, Slack, and WebEx Teams. In this post, I will show you how to send Cisco ACI faults and events to messages straight to Slack and WebEx Teams. ...
In my previous post, I showed you how easy it is to have a network configuration backup with a GUI and messaging and keep it synchronized with GitHub to see the changes, and also sending messages to Slack and emails when it runs. For this post, I modified the scripts to use a cool Open Source tool named Gogs (Thanks Nikolay Ryzhkov for bringing this tool to my attention). With Gogs you will have a local repository system with the same functionalities as GitHub, so you don’t need to worry about sending your configs outside of your own infrastructure. ...
Continuing with the development of my previous post where we made a very simple and complete solution for local network device configuration backups, including alerts via Slack or email. Now we are going to do some modifications to have a free complete GUI and messaging for Cloud Network configuration backups including the history, comments, and actionable buttons. In the end you will be a simple click away to a full online historic track of all the configuration changes, including comments per line of changed code. Take a look at this short video! ...
Automation Bots can help IT operations teams day-to-day work, and enhance the interaction between customers and IT members in a standard, fast, and secure way. (Check the use cases from my previous posts, and new ones to come.) Just keep it simple! That’s the key to also enable easy adoption, a low learning curve, easy operability, and maintainability. Let’s talk about those concepts. Cheap: the software is Open Source: Linux, Python, Ansible, Salt, and Slack (not Open Source but with a free account is enough). So it’s better than cheap, it’s free. I will talk more about this later. ...
Find out how you can tremendously simplify IT support no matter where or when. Using an always online Bot per technology now is simple, straightforward and free. You can even chat with it from your cell phone. Continuing with this saga of posts. Now let’s dive into deep technical use cases. I will do it from a networking perspective just because it’s my main field of knowledge, but since Ansible and Salt are multiplatform, the following use cases are multi-platform in a single playbook. ...