I spent a lot of time in the past two weeks figuring out how to use AWS Client VPN with federation (SAML) with Keycloak. For some reason the SAML XML-file that I downloaded from a new realm in Keycloak, and that I had implemented into AWS IAM Identity Provider, went to the Master realm and not the new realm. The logs did not show any kind of reference to the new realm but only showed that the client could not be found in Master realm. Of course, the client did not exist in the Master realm because I had created the client in the new realm only. I have since figured out why and you can read more about the solution below.

I read a post a couple of months ago (Sadly, I can’t find the link), about basic tooling for your daily work. You should use one product of every type of thing. This could be learning and using for example RabbitMQ for pub/sub, queues and such. If you ever need a go-to database it could be MariaDB etc. Monitoring could be Sensu etc. I have decided to do just that. I have started using RabbitMQ for processing messages that get sent to queues. Let’s say that I want to download a video from a video site. I will send a json-blob to a queue in RabbitMQ and some other process will look at that queue and process it the json data which contains a URL. The output will be delivered to a bucket in AWS S3. If the json-blob gets sent to a another queue, it will only process the video to extract the audio, and then it will send it to S3.

For the past several years there has been cultucal/political trend to limit young people purchasing alcohol such as hard liquor, beer and wine. You have to be above 16 or 18 depending on what you want to buy. I tend to disagree with this trend because I started drinking when I was 15. I remember when we were done with classes in middle school, most of us went to the local bar to drink. It wasn’t like we got totally wasted. We had one or two beers and then we went on our way home afterwards. It was good on a friday afternoon, just sit back and enjoy your beer. Many many years later I completely stopped drinking but it does not relate to any negative things regarding consuming alcohol. There are always people who will abuse it - that is just how things are. You can say that abusing things like sugary foods/drinks, fatty foods such as pizza, burgers etc. is also very bad for you. If you’re going to do stuff that are unhealthy, you should do it in moderation. So I do not consider consuming alcohol at an earlier age than 16/18 as a bad thing. I would rather have that my kids after the age of 15 enjoy a beer in the open rather than keeping it a secret.

Back in the fall of 2003 I started playing Star Wars Galaxies. I remember I started the game and chose Tatooine as the starting location, because it was the only planet that I actually did remember from the Star Wars movies. Planets like Rori, Corellia or Dantooine were not planets that I had heard of before. I picked my starting profession as a marksman going with the pistoleer as my main branch afterwards. I played for a few days alone wandering around Tatooine when I met a guy named Steps Basic. I think I met him outside of Bestine Starport. He introduced me to the game and helped me out a lot. One day he and I went to Dar’Xun City. He was a member of the guild Dar’Xun Legion and they lived in that town. It was located south of Bestine and west of Anchorhead (A rebel town/outpost). I joined the guild a couple of days later and I got to meet some really incredibly nice people. I remember I stayed up all night playing because most of the members were from the US. There was also a group of Europeans playing in the guild but for some reason they decided to leave a couple of months after I joined. They formed their own guild in the playercity Mos Ari - If I remember correctly they chose the name L’A’W (Lowland Agedan Warriors). Their town was located northwest of Mos Espa. Later L’A’W disbanded and became Dune Sea Warriors afterwards.

I stand with Ukraine. Of course, I do! If your country gets attacked you do whatever you can to defend it. That is what I would do. They have a right to selfdetermination and if they want to join NATO they can. If they want to join the European Union, they have a right to do that as well. It is up to them and hopefully they will do that some day. The aggression of Russia is unacceptable, and thus they will be repelled from Ukraine. I stand with Ukraine!

I need to integrate RabbitMQ to send data to it and then do something with that data. I read on a blog a couple of weeks ago, that you need to have some services available to you such as a database, message queue etc. I haven’t picked a database yet, but I think RabbitMQ is a good message queue service, where I can send data to it and then have some other service do something with that data. This could be things such as sending YouTube links for downloading those videos. Maybe collecting new music from various sources and saving them into the queue for later processing. The options are endless and I just have to keep exploring.

I have been working on AWS for the past 9 years. I have multiple certifications in the field and I really enjoy working on that platform. When I try to use Azure or Google Cloud Computing, I have a hard time motivating myself to do work on them. I know that I should because learning one or more cloud provider technologies is beneficial in the competitive world of IT. The more you know the better chance of they’ll hire you, but I just think that you’ll never be as good as someone who has dedicated all his time at work and his free time to do work on a single platform. Being multicloud is not something special - yeah, you know how to create a VM on 2 or more cloud’s, but that does not make you awewsome at it. Using Terraform or some other multicloud tool does not make you awesome either.

So this will be my new blog where I will be blogging about IT, books and of course AWS. I will hopefully blog frequently.

Corona virus is upon us here in Denmark. Stores except supermarkets, workplaces, schools and other educational places are all closed. We have been asked to work from home and that means having more meetings over video conferencing. It is doable but sometimes you just want to have people around you. I mean, you sort of miss the water cooler talk and talking about daily stuff. It has been somewhat troublesome and difficult to find good and precise daily routines for me and my family, and it does not make it any better that we all have to teach our kids at home. But we are making it work and it is a learning process for us as well.

For the past several years I’ve had a hard time playing new games. I find them really boring because I feel like I’m playing a movie. There are long cutscenes, you have to follow a specific path and everything is sort of scheduled. I don’t like that. So I decided a couple of days ago to start playing Star Wars Galaxies again. Its a sandbox MMO from 2003. It was shut down in 2008 because of lack of subscribers.