Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Engineering teams that build, scale, and manage cloud-based applications on AWS know that at some point in time, their applications and infrastructure will be under attack. But as applications expand and new features are added, securing the full scope of an AWS environment becomes an increasingly complex task. To add visibility and auditability, AWS CloudTrail tracks the who, what, where, and when of activity that occurs in your AWS environment and records this activity in the form of audit logs.

Amazon’s EKS service (Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes) allows you to create a Kubernetes control plane in your AWS account without having to configure Kubernetes master nodes, etcd, or the api servers. In this blog post we will cover the motivation for using EKS, the preparation required to create an EKS cluster, how to configure EKS in Terraform, and how to set up kube2iam with EKS.

As with most commercial products, software today is mass produced for reasons of simple economics. But making the same software work for as many people as possible while also meeting the unique requirements different people and organizations have is a challenging task.

HashiCorp Packer is a free and open source tool for creating golden images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer makes it easy to codify VM images for Microsoft Azure. In this blog post we’ll look at how to use HashiCorp Packer and Puppet Bolt to define our VM templates in code.

With the introduction of the Package Activity API and accompanying CLI command, you can now quickly and easily check your entire repository for packages' activity status or even take a detailed approach and view packages individually (per day/per package). You can save on your storage costs by eliminating inactive packages and retaining only the packages you or your users derive value from storing and distributing via Cloudsmith.