Scribblings of an experienced IT Engineer
After nearly 12 years, my journey with Akkodis (formerly Ajilon) has come to an end When I joined the organisation in 2014, I was the only team member holding an AWS certification. My first assignment was supporting the delivery of the Landgate Land Registry as a Service (LRaaS) project—a pioneering cloud-native platform that transformed land Continue reading "After almost 12 years, it s time for…
In contemporary IP network connected devices, encryption is a requirement. Not just on inbound connections for administration, but outbound integrations as well. Those updates obviously includes adding new protocols when they are new, as well as removing older protocols when they are dangerous to keep using (though there is some wiggle room there if users Continue reading "Trust Stores need…
Last week saw a major incident for an Australian telco that literally stopped trains, business, and other services across Australia. After a week it was revealed that the company s internal time servers had not been well maintained, and flipped over 19.x years of uptime, causing them to warp back in time20 years. Apparently it was Continue reading "The importance of time in networks"
DNS is everywhere. Your laptop uses it. Your phone uses it. Your production servers use it. Its everywhere, but for many people, once its working, they forget about it. And yet, DNS can be used for data transfer (several bytes at a time), it can be used to lookup malicious domains, it can be used Continue reading "Securing DNS in production networks"
According to the Australian Dept Defence s Australian Signals Directorate and their mandate in Cyber Security support to Australian Government and the whole of Australian industry, 55% of the cybersecurity incidents reported to them are for compromised asset, network, or infrastructure. That dominates the #2 in the list Denial and Distributed Denial of Service, at 21% Continue reading "Secure your…
Shortly after I joined my current employer as a cloud engineer, I was invited to participate in the AWS Cloud Warrior program, circa 2016. This was introduced as the AWS program for the best engineers in the AWS partner community, and its inception in Australia meant that it was filled with many significant people in Continue reading "Goodbye AWS Ambassador Program"
The last three months have seen a large number of IPv6 announcements from AWS. I ll recount some of them here: Much of the public (Internet) facing endpoints for these services are now dual-stack, supporting both IPv4 and IPv6 (for now). But have a think about the VPC endpoints that are now either dual stack, or Continue reading "A ton of IPv6 innovations in AWS"
At first glance, this seems like a strange thing to be even mildly excited about. AWS has been added dual stack (having both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses) for their services for some time, and I have blogged about this many times over. First, lets just go read the brief release, from April 21 of 2025 Continue reading "Amazon SQS adds IPv6 support"
In 2010 my family returned to Australia to raise our child (now children) from the UK. I needed a local mobile phone service, and I selected Optus, as their pricing and offering (included data) was about right. After a few years, I settled in to a $39/month, 30 GB plan. Around 2024, Optus advised me Continue reading "Goodbye Optus"
It s taken a long time, but the top of the chart of AWS Cloud consulting services partners has had a shake up on the leader board. It s not scientific, and could mean nothing, but I have been tracking the reported number of AWS Cloud certifications across the AWS Partner Community for a while now. It Continue reading "TCS is now the world s largest AWS Consulting Services Partner, by count of AWS…