I have been working on AWS for the past 9 years. I have multiple ceritifications 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 the others. 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.

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.

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.

I really love AWS Parameter Store. It’s a services where you can save encrypted data such as keys and password. These encrypted values can be queried and downloaded into an EC2-instance and used. This could be things such as RDS DB passwords, private SSH keys etc. I actually used it for a private SSH key. I needed the server to run a ‘git pull’ at specific times in the day, and there was no webhook available, so I did it like that.

Yesterday I did a small task updating our Saltmaster configuration using Github webhooks, API Gateway, AWS Lambda and AWS SSM. When someone pushed to the Git repo master branch, a webhook sends the information to API Gateway which triggers an AWS Lambda function. The function sends an AWS SSM Run Command to the Saltmaster which then runs a bash script updating from Github. Boom… and the Saltmaster is updated and restarted.

A couple of months ago Amazon Web Services came with a new service called AWS SSO. It is used for Single Sign-On for products such as the AWS Console, Github, Salesforce etc. I did a bit of tinkering with it, because I wanted to do CLI authentication with AWS SSO and obtain an STS token that way. It was not possible :( AWS however came up with a new feature where you could see your keys and such, copy/paste them into your terminal and then do stuff on AWS.