If you’ve ever worked with AWS in the real world you are probably very used to seeing IAM Users and Roles which are terrifyingly over-permissioned. In my experience it’s pretty common to find them in the wild with access to every attribute of a specific service or just as often the native AdministratorAccess Managed Policy assigned. The principle of least privilege is a concept that you often hear about a . . .
It’s no secret that I love Terraform but it’s not without it’s drawbacks and when operating a platform built around Kubernetes it can be a tall order to introduce and migrate to. In this post I’m going to look at a less well known Infrastructure as Code solution; Crossplane. Whilst it’s creators don’t bill it as an IaC solution it certainly offers the same functionality in a very different way . . .
Previously we looked at using Localstack to emulate AWS services and speed up the feedback loop during development. In this short post we’re going to look at how to integrate this tool with Terraform to perform some simple testing that can emulate our builds for free and give us some confidence in our code before running it. This post will assume that you have Localstack installed and running. If not, . . .
One of the challenges that seems to crop up pretty frequently is reliably simulating a cloud platform or application without having to tediously configure a sandbox environment for every little change. Even when a sandbox is present, the cost of operating them can quickly run out of control and can still need several people to implement even a small change. Localstack is an emulator for an ever growing number of . . .
In a previous article we took a look at the very unwieldy integration of the Istio IngressGateway with an AWS Application Load Balancer, however we didn’t look at any Health Check options to monitor the the ALB via it’s Target Group. A dig around the usual forums suggests that this is confusing a lot of people and it threw me the first time I looked. In post we’ll have a . . .
S3 seems to really rule the roost for cloud-based Object Storage and it’s not really a surprise given how flexible it is; often seeing use as hosting for static websites, storing bulk analytics or logs or providing the storage backend for applications amongst many other uses. As S3 content often needs to be presented to the public for anonymous access; the contents of a Bucket are not encrypted by default . . .
This article was going to be a look at how to configure IAM roles to work with EKS Service Accounts, however that topic is already well documented in the AWS docs right here. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with it in a technical sense, I can’t help find it a little clunky, using the AWS CLI and eksctl to get the job done. I’ve been pretty unattracted to eksctl (though it . . .
At the end of last year I wrote about some basic methods for debugging networking issues inside a Kubernetes Cluster. In that article we very briefly mentioned a then-alpha feature (with a complicated sounding name) called Ephemeral Debug Containers first introduced back in Kubernetes v1.16. This looks to be the real future of debugging in Kubernetes and as of v1.20 it’s finally in beta. This great feature really strengthens a . . .
Recently I’ve had the experience of reconfiguring the popular Kubernetes Service Mesh Istio (using it’s Gateway ingress model) to work with an AWS Application Load Balancer with a degree of automation and scalability. This is a challenging deployment to say the least and whilst documentation exists to varying degrees for the separate components, it’s scant. I’m less than impressed with the official Istio documentation (though it has gotten way better) . . .
Last year I wrote about automating Elastic Kubernetes Service role configuration (direct modification of the aws-auth ConfigMap) using Terraform, and a somewhat clunky method of injecting ARN data by looking it up from a secret management service (in this case Hashicorp Vault). Whilst the solution works well it comes with a serious built in issue when we want to provision a new deployment from scratch, namely the need to import . . .