Google Cloud Platform tends to be forgotten from the conversation a lot when talking about public cloud offerings, however their hosted Kubernetes offering GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) has for me been the best of the major offerings for getting to grips with the platform and the best reason to use GCP at all. Without much issue we can get Terraform integrated with GCP, provision and scale out clusters as we . . .
Vault offers an array of flexible storage backends with a view to providing a highly available storage location to store secrets, this is a great baked-in design choice as if you make Vault an integral part of your infrastructure you can ill afford a sudden outage, a perfect platform for storing structured data is, of course, a RDBMS (Relational Database Management System), as many of the mainstays are scalable and . . .
In a previous post we’ve looked at how to build Azure infrastructure with Terraform, handle sensitive secrets by storing them within Vault and centrally manage states within Azure Object Storage (confusingly called Containers). In this post we’ll take a look at the same solution but leverage the same technology within AWS, making use of AWS S3 object storage platform and using Terraform to provision further AWS resources. Sample code for . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
In a previous post we’ve looked at how to build Azure infrastructure with Terraform and handle sensitive secrets by storing them within Vault and looking them up at run time. This however still poses a problem if we’re using the default local backend for Terraform; particularly that these secrets will be stored in plain text in the resulting state files and in a local backend they will be absorbed in . . .
In a previous post we looked at building AlienVault OSSIM, but the setup of a SIEM is pretty Spartan without any data sources feeding it. The Operating System integration for AlienVault is surprisingly Windows-centric for a Linux platform, so lets look at the somewhat involved process for gathering logs from Linux servers using AlienVault. Some Quick Setup For this configuration, we’ll be monitoring the existing Vault server mc-vault capturing the . . .