Where does one begin? Way back in 2007, a coworker told me about this new thing called AWS. He said you could instantly provision a server in the cloud, use it for as long as you want, and then get rid of it. We were looking for a way to…

Cloud architects and security engineers working on projects built on AWS put a lot of focus on threats coming into a network, and rightfully so. Bots, scrapers, and hackers are constantly trying to break into whatever they can. To counter those efforts, we deploy AWS WAF web ACLs, configure Security…

With the recent upgrade of Amazon’s serverless, interactive analytics service Athena, customers may find themselves confronted with a need to upgrade to the new engine version. The new engine version offers faster performance, 50 new SQL functions, better integration with AWS Glue, and more. However, as with any major upgrade…

When I work with a client on an application build in the cloud, I need to build the infrastructure to meet their uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA). This figure is usually expressed as a certain number of 9s — such as 99.99%. That means that the application can only experience…

While running containerized workloads and leveraging AWS’ serverless offerings are the wave of the future, sometimes it is necessary to run workloads using good, old-fashioned EC2 instances. The challenge that comes with running your own instances is keeping them patched. AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager does a fantastic job of…

With the introduction of the 4.0 version of Terraform’s AWS provider, a lot has changed when it comes to setting up a working static website using CloudFront and S3. With the approach to S3 resources significantly changed, it can be hard to figure out what to do with so many…

When I first set out to learn Kubernetes, I wanted to do so in a way that could be combined with my favorite versatile little device: the Raspberry Pi. I have used the Raspberry Pi to run Pi-hole on my home network to keep ads and garbage content out of…

Since registering my domain, donnyspi.com, in 2001, I have never used one of the big email providers for my mail. I always used the email service that came with my webhost, or I’d run my own mail server. These days, running one’s own mail server is an exercise in futility…

Back in 1997, when the web still felt like the wild west where style and aesthetics were still in their infancy, I created my first website. It was a simple homepage, which was hosted on Angelfire’s platform, where I was allowed a whopping 200KB of space. …