Intro I have been exploring serverless platforms in various guises for some time now. I won’t name any names, but I’ve played around with most of the various major platforms. The common thing that I noticed when using other platforms was that I needed to either wrap my code in a vendor specific DSL or language, or that I needed to import libraries from the vendor. As a developer, that didn’t really float my boat and, was difficult to get up and running as existing code needed to be refactored and so on....

Intro I’ve been fooling around with pulumi for a bit now, and thought I would write about it here. What is it? Pulumi is an infrastructure as code framework with a twist. You can use any language you like in order to write your code (within reason). The pulumi tagline is Your cloud. Your language. Your way. I’m here to say it’s true! I’ve previously written about using pulumi and yaml....

Intro I’ve been doing a lot recently with what is known in the industry as “shifting left” with security. Essentially this is the concept of moving security related checks closer to the beginning (or the left) of the software development lifecycle. As I’ve been doing some of this with work, it has raised a number of questions for me personally about moving security checks earlier in the software development lifecycle....

Intro I’ve been doing a bit of work recently with different CI tools. One of the ones that I’ve been using is buildkite. You can find out more about buildkite buildkite.com Infrastructure In order to use buildkite, I need to stand up a buildkite agent, or a runner. In builtkite terms its called an agent. I am going to stand up all of my infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). My chosen IaC framework is pulumi....

Intro I’ve been programming in C on unix for a long time - too long in fact. I was reminded recently by someone that everything is a file in Linux / Unix. Tip I am going to use the term Linux to cover off both Unix and Linux from here on I thought that I would write about this with some code examples, and given I’m currently working for a security company, I thought it would be useful to point out how to use this functionality for evil rather than good from a security perspective....

Intro I’ve been fooling around with pulumi for a bit now, and thought I would write about it here. What is it? Pulumi is an infrastructure as code framework with a twist. You can use any language you like in order to write your code (within reason). The pulumi tagline is Your cloud. Your language. Your way. I’m here to say it’s true! Why is it cool? Pulumi is super cool because it means as a developer I can write infrastructure as code for my cloud based infrastructure in a language I am comfortable with....

Intro I recently had a discussion with a friend about what was better with regards to creating API’s. Design First or Code First. The approaches are radically different. We debated back and forth a bit, and I decided what better way to figure this out than to do two four hour sprints and write about the results. This post is about the first sprint that I did which was the Code First approach....

Intro I was recently challenged with the single task of being able to monitor all connectivity in and out of a process. At first thought this is actually fairly easy. “I’ll just use tcpdump” I thought to myself. That single sentence lead me down a rabbit hole of processes, namespaces and the linux kernel. I thought that I would share my experiences of how to do this. Why do this at all?...

Intro I have decided to investigate the difference and strengths and weaknesses of using subtrees versus submodules in git. Both have pros and cons, and in this post I explore them both. What prompted this? Recently I decided to update my hugo instance to use mermaid. Mermaid is a library that allows you to embed diagrams in markdown. This means that I can create diagrams simply by using markdown. My hugo theme, was installed as a git submodule....

Intro I recently sat down and thought to myself “I wonder how the current market of mini or micro kubernetes distributions is going”. I’ve been using minikube for a bit and thought to myself it was about time to start using a few other distributions. So I have been experimenting with different micro or mini distributions. This post is about microk8s. microk8s microk8s is an open source project that you can find here: [https://microk8s....