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The personal website of Phil MassynΒΆ

Resilient Software Design

When you operate a large fleet of servers, patching your operating system and other software components is a necessary task to prevent malware and external threat actors from taking control of your system. In a number of cases, I've heard clients use the words: "I can't patch my system because it might cause an outage." Let's unpack this disturbing statement.

The root account

The AWS Root account is an absolute god user for your AWS account. This account must be kept secure, and only used in absolute emergencies. For an account that is so sensitive and secure, I was quite surprised that it is integrated into almost everything that Amazon does.

Digital Ocean is (probably not) better than AWS

Earlier this week, while browsing through my Twitter feed, I saw a post where someone was saying that Digital Ocean was better than AWS. Having used both of them extensively, the post caught my attention, and after reading through the comments, it became very clear to me that there was a huge misunderstanding between the two services. Let's break it down.

Accessing your EC2 instances securely

Cloud-native applications are certainly the way to go to maximize your cloud investment, however, for many organizations, redeveloping their in-house applications to be cloud-native can be a daunting (and expensive) exercise. So in many cases, it makes sense to lift-and-shift the on-prem servers to the cloud to utilize at least some of the benefits of cloud infrastructure.

Having those servers in the cloud is one thing, how do you connect securely to them to perform your support tasks?