What’s New?
Our New Podcast: Tales From the Ops Side
New listening - that’s what’s new! stack.io Founder and CEO Hany Fahim has launched a brand new podcast show for you, our readers. Titled Tales From the Ops Side, this show is a must-listen for anyone working in or interested in tech. The trailer episode is a welcome to the show, with an exploration into what drives Hany, and what it takes to run an Internet ops company.
Episode 1 tells the fascinating and sometimes frightening story of some massive DoS attacks that knocked clients offline for extended periods of time, along with ransom letters demanding thousands of dollars. Hany and his team spent hundreds of hours dealing with the attacks, which led to a Denial of Sleep, too!
Meanwhile, in episode 2, Hany takes listeners on an eclectic journey as he explores the connection between crashed websites, earthquakes, leap seconds, and the moon!
We travel to Brazil in episode 3 (coming soon) for an intriguing tale of the global ripple effects of a political event and the phenomenal power of social media. This tale is a thought-provoking look at how business, politics, and technology are deeply intertwined.
You can find Tales from the Ops Side here. You can listen online or find the show in your favourite podcasting app or online at your usual listening platform. We hope you’re as excited about this show as we are!
We’ll be adding new episodes weekly, and we encourage your feedback and episode suggestions. We’ll be especially grateful if you leave a review on iTunes for Tales From the Ops Side!
AWS Aurora Module is Now Available
Aurora is a scalable and high performance AWS managed relational database. Aurora instances are around 20% more expensive compared to similar sized RDS instances, however, there are certain benefits that aurora offers.
Aurora’s read replica can automatically become a master in the event of the master node failing with no data loss.
Data storage can automatically scale up from 10GB to 64TB. Each 10GB of data chunk is replicated six-ways across 3 AZs and encrypted using a KMS key.
It autoscales read replicas based on the traffic coming through.
Aurora can help you to improve your overall performance and if your database access pattern is intermittent, you can benefit from Aurora autoscaling functionality to optimize your bill.
Running Elasticsearch Directly on Your Kubernetes Cluster
Compared with a self managed Elasticsearch, the AWS managed Elasticsearch is: not up to date, lacks several useful features, and is over 30% more expensive. Self managed Elasticsearch offers a few key benefits.
A variety of platform ingestions such as Metricbeat and Filebeat modules for AWS
Centralized management for Beats and Logstash
You can utilize X-Pack which is an Elastic Stack extension that provides security, alerting, monitoring, reporting, machine learning, and many other capabilities
You can use up to date Elasticsearch 7.10.
AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. Stack.io’s terraform module will enable CloudTrail and set up a basic rule about your root user account. If there are any other rules you’d like us to set up, just let us know.
Useful Reading
Announcing Hashicorp Boundary https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-boundary
Verifying Service Mesh TLS in Kubernetes, using ksniff and Wireshark
EKS Distro is a distribution of the same version of Kubernetes deployed by Amazon EKS, which you can use to manually create your own Kubernetes clusters anywhere you choose
AWS Lambda now supports container images for all the supported Lambda runtimes (Python, Node.js, Java, .NET, Go, Ruby) so that you can easily add your code and dependencies
Fun Stuff
David Hasselhoff, Flavor Flav, and Carole Baskin explain DevOps
Play Mario in your Vim
Building a K8s cluster on your Raspberry Pi