Terraform is great, it’s as simple as that, codifying complex infrastructure provisioning in to simple, readable configuration files, however there are some scenarios where you have bespoke requirements that you would like to do in a script that HCL just doesn’t offer (a problem that can plague many configuration languages and is slowly trying to be addressed as configuration languages mature more, as a side note check out Brendan Burn’s . . .
Even in 2020 (current year argument), it’s woeful how prevalent Brute Force Attacks are, what’s more worrying is how successful they are, whilst it might seem that the logical thing to do is just to harden password policies that’s not really the way the tide is turning and I’d remind anyone to remember Kerckhoffs’s principle of The Enemy Knows The System. What Is fail2ban? I’ve briefly discussed the use of . . .
Previously we looked at implementing a CI/CD pipeline using both Terraform and Ansible for provisioning and Configuration Management. In this deployment we relied on an official Python Docker image to build our Ansible environment, however this required a few steps that add a few top-heavy steps that could be solved by creating our own Docker image instead. The sample code for this post is in my GitHub here. Speeding up . . .
In previous posts we looked at a basic example of creating Immutable Infrastructure via BitBucket Pipelines using Terraform as well as why we would want to use Immutable Infrastructure and what benefits it brings. However we didn’t look at how to extend the pipeline in to Configuration Management. We’re going to look at that now, leveraging Ansible within the pipeline to automatically configure the instances we create immediately after they . . .
Immutable Infrastructure became the new buzzword of DevOps teams a few years ago (around the time that Cattle Not Pets became the decisive philosophy of those same teams) and is one that makes perfect sense. In order for Infrastructure as Code mentalities to be properly executed we need to think of infrastructures (and in particular Cloud Infrastructure) less as nodes to be manually configured and more as abstract objects which . . .
Previously I’ve looked at Azure DevOps as a fantastic platform for deploying CI/CD pipelines, and it is, however it’s obvious inclination for Azure makes it something of an issue when trying to work on other public cloud providers, and Azure obviously isn’t the only game in town. There’s also the issue of complexity. Whilst Azure DevOps is incredibly flexible and powerful, this leads to complexity and we don’t always need . . .
In a complex Linux environment where multiple administrators have a requirement to manage countless machines (or even a small amount of machines), there is inevitably a requirement to manage SSH Private Keys, as well as the large administrative overhead that comes with cycling them when they expire, or new admins join or move teams. Vault offers us a method to remove the churn of key cycling. A fantastic feature of . . .
A useful function nested within Ansible is the ability to query remote REST APIs, return the JSON data, parse it and perform subsequent actions based on the data that your get back. When we make the subsequent action sending to a remote Webhook we can then make the function even more powerful (most of the time that is going to be sending a notification to a remote system to let . . .
Previously we’ve discussed the deployment of Docker containers to Azure and managing Scale Out of instances but not the use of Docker directly. The terminology of Docker has become a little confused of late as containers become the new hot topic, for clarity Docker itself is an application that can be used to create, manage and orchestrate containers, and it’s the orchestration that we’re going to be looking at in . . .
In previous posts I’ve looked at the setup of AlienVault OSSIM and managing logs from both Windows and Linux Operating Systems. However as any admin knows dealing with servers is only half the battle when it comes to logs, network devices are arguably the most important part. In this post we’ll be looking at log management for Juniper JUNOS, Cisco IOS and VMware EXSi devices in particular, all of which . . .