When it comes to securing the cloud, one often overlooked part is monitoring failed login attempts, and more specifically in this case failed login attempts to the AWS console. Of course things like strong user passwords and enabling 2FA should be the first setting you do when creating a new account. But now that you up and running, you could have a situation where someone manages to get some usernames from you company and starts trying to break in, how would you know?

Ever wondered how when browsing through the Amazon website/app there is always a list of products that are “Recommended for you…”? Do you often sit there and think “How on earth do they know that I might want to buy those unicorn socks with matching scarf….”? Well, it’s not witchcraft, Blackmagic or lucky guesses. For the past decade or so Amazon has been spending a lot of time investing in their machine learning algorithm that powers their recommendations service on their sites.

Like many others working in the tech space, I like to dabble in other areas that are closely aligned to my role. So this time I decided I wanted to have a crack at building a very simple REST API. Seeing as I had been a web developer in a previous life, I have some working knowledge of JavaScript, so looked at NodeJS as the programming language for my new shiny API.

An all to often forgotten part of building services/applications is making sure to load test it. This process usually requires someone to manually test a set of endpoints, or if you not from the early 2000’s, to write some automated testing. There are so mamy ways of doing automated testing that range from simple to very in depth. Usually a company will have a QA team who can deal with this sort of thing.

AWS Kinesis Data Streams gave us a little surprise recently when we were doing routine maintenance. We got a few streams into an odd state where they appeared to have a ‘Dangling Shard’ that was not being processed by the consumers. Find out how to spot this and how to fix it.

Continuing on from Part 1 of how we built the Byte Size blog using CI/CD. This time we dig deeper into the whole process and hopefully have a working CI/CD at the end of it. So lets just jump right in!

Imagine you’re looking to build a service or application which connects to an external service via access keys, or credentials. How do you plumb those into your application? Do you know if your secrets are really secret?

I often get a little bored while driving to and from work. Most days I either listen to music or podcasts. Then there are days when I don’t want to listen to either, and my mind comes up with some interesting, and for the most part, bizarre ideas. Lets have a look to see what happened this time.

Let us have a look at how Byte Size Blog is put together. We will run through the process of getting content from our laptops to being an article on the blog using a very simple CI/CD pipeline built with CircleCI and GitHub. So lets dive right in, so to speak…

Encryption of EBS volumes can now be done at AWS account root level. Lets have a quick look to see how to do this in your own account