In this blog post, I’ll show you how to build a lightweight SIEM system in AWS using AWS OpenSearch and its Security Analytics features, combined with Zeek. This solution enables real-time monitoring of cloud network traffic and generates alerts when potential threats are detected.
In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to leverage Suricata with the AWS Gateway Load Balancer and Terraform to implement a highly available, scalable, and cost-effective IDS/IPS solution in AWS. This approach will enable you to monitor network traffic, detect threats, and block them before they reach your systems.
When developing applications, particularly in the realm of containerization, CI/CD workflows and pipelines play an important role in ensuring automated testing, security scanning, and seamless deployment. Leveraging a pipeline-based approach enables fast and secure shipping of new features by adhering to a standardized set of procedures and principles. Using the AWS cloud’s flexibility amplifies this process, facilitating even faster development cycles and dependable software delivery. In this blog post, I aim to demonstrate how you can leverage AWS CodePipeline and Amazon ECS alongside Terraform to implement an automated CI/CD pipeline. This pipeline efficiently handles the building, testing, and deployment of containerized applications, streamlining your development and delivery processes.
Note: This is an updated version of this blog. Building Lambda Functions with Terraform Introduction Many of us use Terraform to manage our infrastructure as code. As AWS users, Lambda functions tend to be an important part of our infrastructure and its automation. Deploying - and especially building - Lambda functions with Terraform unfortunately isn’t as straightforward as I’d like. (To be fair: it’s very much debatable whether you should use Terraform for this purpose, but I’d like to do that - and if I didn’t, you wouldn’t get to read this article, so let’s continue)
In today’s data-driven world, effective data management is crucial for organizations aiming to make well-informed, data-driven decisions. As the importance of data continues to grow, so does the significance of robust data management practices. This includes the processes of ingesting, storing, organizing, and maintaining the data generated and collected by an organization. Within the realm of data management, schema evolution stands out as one of the most critical aspects. Businesses evolve over time, leading to changes in data and, consequently, changes in corresponding schemas. Even though a schema may be initially defined for your data, evolving business requirements inevitably demand schema modifications. Yet, modifying data structures is no straightforward task, especially when dealing with distributed systems and teams. It’s essential that downstream consumers of the data can seamlessly adapt to new schemas. Coordinating these changes becomes a critical challenge to minimize downtime and prevent production issues. Neglecting robust data management and schema evolution strategies can result in service disruptions, breaking data pipelines, and incurring significant future costs. In the context of Apache Kafka, schema evolution is managed through a schema registry. As producers share data with consumers via Kafka, the schema is stored in this registry. The Schema Registry enhances the reliability, flexibility, and scalability of systems and applications by providing a standardized approach to manage and validate schemas used by both producers and consumers. This blog post will walk you through the steps of utilizing Amazon MSK in combination with AWS Glue Schema Registry and Terraform to build a cross-account streaming pipeline for Kafka, complete with built-in schema evolution. This approach provides a comprehensive solution to address your dynamic and evolving data requirements.
In the process of constructing your Hybrid Hub and Spoke Network within the Cloud, which includes the integration of On-Premises networks and allows internet-based access, the implementation of a network firewall is essential for robust security. This security measure involves thorough traffic analysis and filtering between the entities to safeguard against both internal and external cyber threats and exploits. By actively monitoring and inspecting the flow of traffic, a network firewall plays a crucial role in identifying and blocking vulnerability exploits and unauthorized access attempts. Within the AWS ecosystem, the AWS Network Firewall is a service that is often used for achieving a high level of network security. As a stateful and fully managed network firewall, it includes intrusion detection and prevention capabilities, offering comprehensive protection for VPC-based network traffic. This blog post aims to guide you through the process of integrating the AWS Network Firewall into your hybrid AWS Hub and Spoke network. By doing so, you can effectively analyze, monitor, and filter both incoming and outgoing network traffic among all involved parties, thereby enhancing the overall security of your infrastructure layer.
When leveraging AWS services such as EC2, ECS, or EKS, achieving standardized and automated image creation and configuration is essential for securely managing workloads at scale. The concept of a Golden AMI is often used in this context. Golden AMIs represent pre-configured, hardened and thoroughly tested machine images that encompass a fully configured operating system, essential software packages, and customizations tailored for specific workload. It is also strongly recommended to conduct comprehensive security scans during the image creation process to mitigate the risk of vulnerabilities. By adopting Golden AMIs, you can ensure consitent configuration across different environments, leading to decreased setup and deployment times, fewer configuration errors, and a diminished risk of security breaches. In this blog post, I would like to demonstrate how you can leverage AWS CodePipeline and AWS Stepfunctions, along with Terraform and Packer, to establish a fully automated pipeline for creating Golden AMIs.
When implementing a hybrid cloud solution and connecting your AWS VPCs with corporate data centers, setting up proper DNS resolution across the whole network is an important step to ensure full integration and functionality. In order to accomplish this task, Route53 Inbound and Outbound endpoints can be used. In combination with forwarding rules, they allow you to forward DNS traffic between your AWS VPC and on-premises data centers. In this blog post, I would like to show you how you can leverage Route53 endpoints in combination with Terraform to establish seamless DNS query resolution across your entire hybrid network.
