August 8, 2022

Reading Up

I stayed up late too many nights struggling over what would be the best way to tackle some problems with IaC deployments, that I could not solve myself or by reading other blogs; my brain was too focused on my small deployment, and blogs typically covered even smaller and very specific cases. Learning a quick and easy way to Terraform a container is one thing, but how does that process carry over to Terraforming a VM with Ansible managing the config. Do I use cloud-config to enroll in Ansible roles, or use Terraform actions to hit the configs? How do I go about dependencies that are crucial to the stack I am creating? I was scrabbling for best practices.

July 30, 2022

IAC Epiphanies

Writing my services in IAC (being Terraform and Ansible), as well as being able to for the most part start from a clean state, has been a hugely thought provoking and ultimately rewarding exersise. I have embraced the infrastructure as code ethos, and would gladly die on that hill after seeing it work as it should. Getting away from pets, hand crafted deployments, and hero efforts has given me the insights that I want to share.

July 22, 2022

Terraform Working

Progress on two fronts: I actually got keycloak working behind Haproxy, something that has eluded me on and off for months, and using Terraform to throw up the Docker containers with everything that is needed. It’s nice to be able to run containers that are “tied” together without needing compose, or going as far overboard with k8s. Some things that needs some work would be to move away from strings in the resource definition and move towards using both common vars and security/password vaults. There is also a move towards DNS names and networks, but thats the next step. But here’s the terraform:

July 14, 2022

Terraform Progress

Terraform has been going well, it’s been nice to use the tool to do what it takes some serious scripting to work around. The one thing I’m concerned about, especially with the libvirt provider, is how terraform remediates minor things in the infrasturcure. That begets the question, is it then something that is a core part of the deployment strategy to work around? Using a tool as part of the process, vs using the tool and working within its confines is something that has always been difficult to determine the best practice of.

July 5, 2022

Roadmap: DevOps

I’ve been really feeling stepping up my DevSecOps skills, after really feeling comfortable working with chef and ansible to run configs. I found roadmap.sh, and found myself most of the way down the roadmap for DevOps. I’m halfway through the Infrastructure as Code, needing to do infrastructure provisioning. I’ve written my own provisioning, but perhaps using Terraform can provide value, especially as my code was libvirt only. Being more agile with regards to deployment zone makes the code portable.

July 5, 2022

Roadmap: GoLang

Writing code has been something that has not been something I found I could just jump into and do for hours, but has been enourmously satisfing, personally and professionally. My public git works show that I have been able to write some small projects, but I have never felt comfortable enough to write anything more than some quick utilites. To me, what feels like a complete project are things like persistent daemons or backends that interface with r/w databases and the like, and learning how to do that is something that could be yet another tool in the belt, or possibly a career change.

June 27, 2022

DevOps

It’s been a while; there was a big changeover as I prepared to leave one job and start another. Starting at this new job, I got exposed to Chef, and had the time to really bash at it until I feel comfortable with it. It is a really interesting tool compared to Ansible, as it feels a bit easier to use it as a configuration management tool only, and not taking advantage of Ansible’s ability to reach into anything and do things in almost any manner. Looking back, I see how some of my Ansible playbooks were more like scripts than configuration management. There’s a place for both, and the two tools are not mutually exclusive.

May 5, 2022

My Own API

Work has progressed on my own API: just messing with some data with a spy theme. I’ve been able to do GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE, which has been cool. I’ve got some more avenues to explore, along with just general tidying up: call and run a script via the API for value setting, then general edges to clean up.

After that, putting a web client in front of the API to show off the data and how to work with it. Then I will have been a “full stack dev” and can see what pulled me in to work with. Really exciting stuff!

April 25, 2022

Work Projects

My work projects have mostly scratched my dev itch lately, but with a good one coming to an end, its time to share. I’ve been enjoying writing a switch management project in Ansible, as its been great to have a hack at API’s, network gear, and plain old optimisiation logic. The API’s have been loads of fun and really interesting to get into, after being on my to-do list for ages, and I have a good feeling for JSON structs. This project has been mainly object orientated (if I have terminology right), being that we have an object (the switch) and are making tasks based on what is where. At home, I want to write some API servers for my own use case to get a good feel and slide yet further into dev land.

March 24, 2022

Where I've Been

It’s been a while since I was able to update here, for serveral reasons. First, I was accepted for a Masters at UC Berkeley, and was trying to make that work. Second, I made no progress with Keycloak behind haproxy. Finally, there’s been no other code to show you as its all been on work git servers.

Starting with the UC. I applied for the MICS, or Masters of Information in Cyber Security. The school charged a princely sum of $80k USD to do the course, and with everything I tried, that number never got comfortable. I’m scrapping that plan, moving forward with self-taught hard skills (golang, CEH), and if I want a masters, I can go back to WGU.