Recent Articles on the tecRacer AWS Blog

Dissecting Serverless Stacks (I)

Dissecting Serverless Stacks (I) This post establishes the base for a small series on how to create Serverless based Lambdas which can be deployed in environments without IAM privileges or where the sls command cannot be used at all.

Instant Clones with kitchen-vcenter

Instant Clones with kitchen-vcenter Over the last few posts we optimized our kitchen-vcenter setups and are stuck with the usual, long boot times of Windows systems. Surprisingly, VMware introduced a feature which can help us get rid of those. For good.

Linked Clones with kitchen-vcenter

Linked Clones with kitchen-vcenter Quickly starting new Test Kitchen machines is one of the main concerns for getting the desired feedback cycles in cookbook development. While machines get created as a full clone by default, the kitchen-vcenter driver offers a better alternative.

Defenders - caller based EC2 security with CDK

Defenders: Caller based EC2 security The risk with security credentials is that they get exposed an are being used elsewhere. What if we could prevent that the are being used elsewhere. The idea from the article of William Bengston from netflix was: Dynamically locking credentials to the environment. This implementation of this idea is much more simple with the cdk. So, let’s defend ourselves! Our story here is the battle of the defenders (tm).

Target Mode with Serial Devices

Target Mode with Serial Devices Usually, you will work with SSH or WinRM to connect to remote nodes and configure them. Those standard protocols bring along all the perks of a modern network connection: Encryption, Authentication, File transfers, etc But what if you have a device without network connectivity?

Ruby Layers with Serverless

Ruby Layers with Serverless After showing how easy it is to write AWS Lambda functions in Ruby, we will work on a way to build Layers with external dependencies or shared data in this post.

The kitchen-vcenter Driver

The kitchen-vcenter Driver While many companies already rely on some Cloud for all of their IT systems, bigger enterprise customers often have own data centers which consist of thousands of virtual machines. Under these circumstances, it is often not desirable to only test Chef cookbooks on AWS or Azure, but doing this in the real environment is a better idea. The kitchen-vcenter driver allows you to harness the power of your own IT systems.