How to Encrypt Your Existing AWS S3 Objects

Amazon’s S3 service comes with some pretty handy server-side encryption features. In fact, the S3 web app provides a single control to automatically encrypt all new objects in a bucket with SSE-S3 or SSE-KMS. Unfortunately, these controls only affect new objects. If your bucket already contains 10,000 unencrypted objects, then turning on automatic encryption does […]

Getting Familiar with Google Drive File Stream

Google File Stream is one of the better file-syncing solutions that I’ve come across. It’s a great tool for organizations that need to collaborate on projects. Not only does it manage your Google Drive content, but it also works well with Microsoft Office applications like Word and Excel. Today, I’ll show you how to get […]

How TOTP Systems Like Google Authenticator Work

Over a decade ago, my employer issued me an RSA SecurID token to protect their VPN. This little device had a six-digit LCD display that would roll over to a new random-looking number every minute. I had to add whatever it showed at the moment to my password in order to successfully authenticate. Today, a […]

Using Docker & Kubernetes Together to Design & Maintain Your Infrastructure

If you’re in charge of an IT infrastructure, you’ve most likely done the same jobs over and over. You’ve also probably heard of Docker and Kubernetes. The two have commonly been mistaken for rivals, but the truth is, they work very well together. Why Docker? When deciding where to build your infrastructure — especially if […]

Implementing Google Single Sign-On with an Apache Server

If you’re using Google Chrome or one of Google’s many apps, you’ve probably seen a screen similar to this one. You can achieve this for your internal websites or mobile apps using an Apache server and Google’s OpenID Connect 1.0. This is a simple identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol (Google’s authentication […]

Why & How We’ve Starting Using RailsAdmin Internally

RailsAdmin is an open-source tool for Rails Engine that allows you to manage your data with a user-friendly interface. It’s great for building internal infrastructure because it’s something everyone in the company can use. RailsAdmin is so straightforward, you won’t even have to train users. Here are some of the basic features of RailsAdmin: Display […]

Four Considerations when Managing an AWS VPC

Hosting your cloud infrastructure on AWS in a more protected environment can strengthen the security of your infrastructure. That’s what an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is for. It creates an isolated slice of the cloud within which you have control to manage your own network. But it also means you’re now required to manage […]

LocalStack + Terraform + CircleCI for Lambda without AWS

On my current project, we’re using LocalStack in lieu of AWS for development and test. In this post, I’ll walk through how we’ve set it up and what we can do with it.

Updating AWS Lambda Function Code when Local Files Change

For my project, we have a Node.js server deployed as an AWS Lambda function. The server’s dependencies (Node modules) are deployed in a Lambda layer. We want an easy process to deploy a new Lambda layer version when we update the Node modules and to update the Lambda function code whenever we update the local […]

Docker for Mac: Overcoming Slow Mounted Volumes with Visual Studio Code

A couple of years ago, Will Pleasant-Ryan wrote Docker for Mac: Overcoming Slow Mounted Volumes, describing his desire to use Docker for local development. He talked about some of the filesystem performance problems that can arise when using a shared volume from the host machine on Mac OS X, along with some potential workarounds and […]

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