Setup a CloudWatch event to detect any status changes in your CI/CD Pipeline and have them sent as messages to a Slack channel of your choice — It’s not exactly an efficient engagement when DevOps and application developers have to go back and forth about status updates for ongoing deployments or in-progress builds. I don’t think either team should really be watching pipelines as they progress. I suspect most people would want to get notified in real-time…

Secure your Kubernetes cluster on AWS by integrating IAM users and roles with RBAC to restrict actions that get carried out on resources — You may have heard people refer to Kubernetes as API centric. That is, what happens in the cluster revolves around a core component in the control plane (or master node) known as the API Server. The API server is like a gatekeeper for your entire cluster. If you want to…

Setup your Kubernetes cluster in an AWS VPC, deploy an application server to the node group in your private subnet and access it through an LB service — In my most recent post, I demonstrated how to deploy a containerised application onto ECS Fargate in a private subnet of a VPC and how to securely expose the deployed application via API Gateway. This time around I want to explore another COE (Container Orchestration Engine) that AWS has to…

Build a secure and private VPC network infrastructure for your ECS Fargate application and setup a secure private integration with API Gateway — Coming up with a title for this post was a tricky one, and I can hardly say that I nailed it. I definitely tried to craft it to capture the attention of potential readers to “sell it”. However, my goal wasn’t just to signal you with buzzwords. If any of…

Learn how to ensure that you only push secure Docker Images to production by detecting security vulnerabilities in your pipelines — Containerising applications offers numerous benefits. However, you want to make sure that your containers are based on secure images and that you can be aware of any vulnerabilities in your applications and their dependencies. A security platform like Snyk offers this kind of in-depth container image scanning and security.

Learn how containerisation technology works and how it differs from Virtual Machines for the next time it comes up at the dinner table — Some of my family members and friends tuned in to watch my virtual talk at DockerCon 2020 and I was highly appreciative of it. The discussion I had with most of them afterwards, however, wasn’t about how I over simplified certain concepts or conveyed a wrong idea of something specific…

I had the awesome opportunity of speaking at DockerCon 2020, and I did so from my lounge 😃 somewhere in Johannesburg, South Africa. The crew at Docker Inc and the Cube deserve a lot of credit for pulling off such a great free digital experience for thousands around the world…

Learn how to create and deploy a serverless static site to S3 with an AWS CI/CD workflow — Static sites have somewhat become the de facto front-end solution with modern web apps. Hence the increasing popularity of frameworks and libraries such as React, Angular and Vue, amongst others. Their power (static sites that is) lies in how simple they are to serve whilst eliminating some of the vulnerabilities…

Caching is one of the most effective techniques or strategies to optimise application performance and user experience. It can be implemented both on the frontend and on the backend. Frontend caching involves storing response data (data returned from requests) on the client side which results in faster navigation and reduces…