Recent Articles on the tecRacer AWS Blog

Using AWS Security Hub for EKS Security

kube-bench is a tool for checking kubernetes clusters against requirements defined in the CIS Benchmark. The tool runs locally on a kubernetes node, performs its checks and prompts the outputs to the shell or to files. This is quite unhandy, because it means that a user needs to pick up the logs, store them somewhere and analyze them. A deployment of the tool via kubernetes can ease the process for example with the kubectl logs command, but it is still far from perfect. Luckily, there is an integration in AWS Security Hub.

Multiple Site-to-Site VPN Connections in AWS Hub and Spoke Topology

When setting up an IPSec VPN connection between your AWS network and your corporate data center, the fully-managed AWS Site-to-Site VPN service is a popular choice that often comes to mind. AWS Site-to-Site VPN offers a highly-available, scalable, and secure way to connect your on-premises users and workloads to AWS. In this blog post, I would like to show you how you can go beyond a simple, static AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection by leveraging dynamically routed Site-to-Site VPNs in combination with a Transit Gateway. This hub and spoke network setup will allow us to employ the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as well as equal-cost multi-path routing (ECMP) and AWS Global Accelerator to not only exchange routing information between AWS and the corporate data center automatically but also increases the overall VPN throughput and reliability.

Out-of-Band Bootstrapping with Chef on AWS Systems Manager

A modern architecture avoids opening any SSH or WinRM/RDP ports to minimize the attack surface of your systems. Instead, management connections like the AWS SSM Agent should be implemented. But some tools, especially in the configuration management sector, still rely on direct access. Chef Infra is on track to break this limitation with its new support for out-of-band (OoB) bootstrapping using Knife and arbitrary Train transports.

Querying Local Health Check URLs

Do you run software that provides locally available health checks via a webserver only reachable via localhost? In this blog post, I will show you an architecture that you can use to connect those local health checks to CloudWatch Logs and even receive alarms if things are not going to plan.

4 ways to connect to your EC2 instance

Connecting to an EC2 instance is basically a no-brainer. I am using an SSH client and starting a connection to the EC2 instance. In this Blog, I will show you four different ways of connecting. One of them is supposedly highly unknown to most people.

Replace Local Cronjobs with EventBridge/SSM

Every machine has recurring tasks. Backups, updates, runs of configuration management software like Chef, small scripts, … But one of the problems in a cloud environment is visibility. Instead of scheduling dozens of cron jobs or tasks per instance, would it not be nice to have a central service for this? You already have. And it’s called EventBridge…