Moving to the Cloud: Get Started With the Basics

In my role with Isobar, I’ve successfully migrated a number of enterprise applications to the Azure and AWS clouds. In the process, I’ve noticed a number of commonalities and taken some lessons learned. I keep these thoughts in mind at all times and have found they greatly contribute to success. Focus on “Why” It is … Continue reading Moving to the Cloud: Get Started With the Basics →

Linters: Keys To Secure, Maintainable, Quality DevSecOps

Linters are static analysis tools that analyze source code and report problems. The term goes all the way back to Bell Labs in 1978 but the concept is still very important today. In my opinion, linters are a key ingredient of a successful DevSecOps implementation, and yet not enough people are aware of linters, how … Continue reading Linters: Keys To Secure, Maintainable, Quality DevSecOps →

Securing and Rotating WordPress Database Credentials with AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager is a simple and powerful way to handle secrets (such as database username/password credentials). It provides support for storing, retrieving, managing, and rotating credentials at an affordable cost (currently $0.40 per secret per month). However, it’s not terribly easy to use with WordPress. I have not been able to find any documentation … Continue reading Securing and Rotating WordPress Database Credentials with AWS Secrets Manager →

AWS Secrets Manager Rotation in CloudFormation

I found AWS’s documentation for how to setup Secrets Manager secret rotation in CloudFormation to be severely lacking as no AWS documentation explains how to use the secret rotation templates provided by AWS within CloudFormation. Automating Secret Creation in AWS CloudFormation gives an example of how to setup the CloudFormation resources for the secret and … Continue reading AWS Secrets Manager Rotation in CloudFormation →

Using Dynamic References to AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store Secure Strings with Elastic Beanstalk

Dynamic references in CloudFormation to secure strings are very handy, providing a simple way to keep secrets (such as passwords) secure. However, SSM Secure String Parameters are only supported in a limited set of places and Elastic Beanstalk environment variables are not one of them (feature request for adding support). Therefore, if you want to … Continue reading Using Dynamic References to AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store Secure Strings with Elastic Beanstalk →

Improve Security and Reduce Costs with AWS SSM Session Manager

AWS recently enhanced its Systems Manager offering with shell access to EC2 instances and then they enhanced it further with SSH tunnel support. With these improvements, it’s now possible to improve your application’s security posture while reducing it’s operational costs and simplifying setup/maintenance. Systems Manager vs Bastion Hosts Minimizing the attack surface, simplifying as much … Continue reading Improve Security and Reduce Costs with AWS SSM Session Manager →

Trusting AWS RDS Certificates in Docker and Beanstalk

To connect to AWS RDS databases using TLS/SSL, the client must trust the certificate provided by RDS; RDS doesn’t use certificates trusted by the CAs (Certificate Authorities) included by operating systems. Without TLS/SSL, the connection to the database isn’t secure, meaning an attacker on the network between the client (running in EC2) and the database … Continue reading Trusting AWS RDS Certificates in Docker and Beanstalk →

End to End Encryption with Beanstalk

Beanstalk is often configured to terminate SSL at the load balancer then make the connection to the web server/application instances using unencrypted HTTP. That’s usually okay as the AWS network is designed to keep such traffic private, but under certain conditions, such as those requiring PCI compliance, DoD/government rules, or simply out of an abundance … Continue reading End to End Encryption with Beanstalk →

Performance Testing WebDAV Clients

Part of migrating applications from on-premises hosting to cloud hosting (AWS, Azure, etc) involves re-evaluating how users access their data. A recent migration involved users running Windows 10 accessing a Windows file share using the SMB protocol. Since SMB isn’t safe to run directly over the Internet (it’s usually not encrypted and it has a … Continue reading Performance Testing WebDAV Clients →