I (sometimes) write stuff about software engineering and public cloud
Back in August AWS announced a new feature that allows you to label your AWS accounts with a color that shows up when you’re using the AWS Console. This is a tiny, but very welcome quality of life improvement that gives you a visual indicator of what type of account you’re using (e.g., 🟩 for dev and 🟥 for prod) - reducing the chance of production accidents and giving each account a bit more…
If you haven’t been around the block (heh) in a while, you might’ve missed the introduction of the moved (Dec ‘21), import (Jun ‘23) and more recently removed (Jan ‘24) blocks in Terraform. They have been great quality-of-life improvements that simplify refactoring and migrating Terraform code, and allow you to change resource names, import existing resources into your state, and remove resources…
You might have heard of AWS CloudFormation, but are you familiar with AWS CloudFormation StackSets? It’s a powerful infrastructure provisioning service in AWS that simplifies multi-account, multi-region deployments and can be very useful to have in your toolbox 🔧 While powerful, StackSets comes with some limitations and surprising behaviors that aren’t well-documented. Strap in to learn more!
Kubernetes offers a uniform interface for running workloads as containers across everything from cloud service providers and on-premises environments, to F-16 fighter jets. The technology is open-source and is accompanied by an open, large and mature ecosystem for monitoring, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment (CD), and pretty much anything else you can think of. This allows you to…
While AWS CodeStar is being deprecated in favor of Amazon CodeCatalyst, AWS CodeCommit is seemingly alive and well. It doesn’t have a ton of features and isn’t seeing much development, but it does the job if all you want to do is host a Git repository inside of AWS (with all the typical goodies this entails such as high availability, integration with IAM, etc.).
Before we jump in, I’d like to recommend checking if you can use AWS IAM Identity Center for managing user identities instead of AWS IAM users. It’s generally a more secure alternative with fewer pitfalls, especially when managing multiple users. Additionally, it supports FIDO-certified security keys for both AWS Console and API access.