All posts by Ashit Mittal

VPC Flow Logs

It’s a feature that helps us capture the metadata information about a Packet passing through a Network Interface.

Remember, it does not capture the packet contents; we need to use the packet sniffer tool for that purpose. Also, VPC flow logs do not capture the information in real-time from network interfaces.

Usually, VPC flow logs can be enabled at three levels:

  1. VPC
  2. Subnet
  3. Individual Network Interface.

Refer to the GitHub link that allows you to create VPC Flow logs at the VPC level for ALL traffic to a Cloudwatch log group. We are using a Custom format to capture the VPC Flow logs.

Further details on the deployment and how to understand log fields are explained in the GitHub files.

For a detailed explanation, refer to the AWS documentation

DNS – Heart of the Internet

Most computer engineers come across this term, and most of them study the concept of DNS. But do you understand it fully? I am sure this article; will help you know how DNS works in an easy language. Let’s start with the basic introduction and other concepts around it.

Introduction:

The full form of the DNS is a domain name server. It is regarded as the Internet phone directory. Comparing the analogy with the standard phone directory, which has a name and associated phone number, DNS contains the website name (domain name) and its associated IP address. In short, it translates a human-readable address, say microsoft.com, to a machine-readable IP address (example 92.123.229.216) because the machine does not understand microsoft.com; it can only understand the IP address.

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Canary Deployments

First of all, let’s try to understand what a deployment is. A deployment is a technique to upgrade or modify an application or service. The aim is to update the application from the user’s perspective without downtime. But this is said in theory because whenever we are deploying to production, things can go wrong. So the only possible way is to reduce the overall downtime, which can be achieved using canary deployments. The best part of using canary deployments is, it can be applied to mobile, desktop, and website applications.

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TLS successor of SSL – An introduction.

Transport Layer Security or, in short, called TLS. It is the successor of SSL. In our previous post, we have explained in simple language; what are SSL certificates and how it helps secure communication over the internet. But now, let’s shift our focus to a more advanced version, i.e., TLS certificates.
TLS is simply a protocol that establishes an encrypted session between the client and the server over the internet. Then it raises one question what the difference between SSL and TLS certificates is? The answer is both are the same; whatever is explained in the previous post about the working of certificates is the same; however, it can be understood as “Digital certificates using either SSL or TLS protocol “to establish a secure connection.

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Demystifying SSL Certificates

These days we all know security is of paramount importance. With increasing online data exchange, we should feel secure while logging into a bank’s website or buying products from e-commerce websites, etc., and not fall victim to cybercrime by compromising our passwords and Credit card information. To ensure all the information is exchanged over the internet securely, we use SSL certificates.

SSL Stands for Secure Socket Layer, a global security technology that enables encrypted communication between the web browser (end-user) and a web server. It also guarantees the trust between two parties during a transaction. Before we explain much more about SSL certificates, let’s try to understand a few terminologies.

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Are Cloud certifications worth?

I am certified on multiple cloud technologies and platforms, including AWS, Azure, etc. I started my certification journey three years back, and since then, I am learning and exploring new tools and technologies. The sad part is to get recertified because most of the technical certifications are valid for 2-3 years. So, if you want to prove your knowledge, then recertify.

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GitOps – Developer centric practice

Finally, we have something for developers, DevOps practices are widely accepted, and it helps to bridge the gap between Developers and Operations team. But GitOps entire focus is on developers and developers only. It can be considered as a combination of Git and DevOps practices. It’s like all the code for the deployment of an application, and its underlying infrastructure is saved on Git repositories and combining with all the DevOps concepts say Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD), etc. GitOps is best used for Cloud Native applications; currently, its best case is to do application deployment and Kubernetes Cluster management. It considers Git as the single source of information and pushes all the data to Kubernetes Clusters, so there is no drift between the desired and current state. This approach is developer-friendly because they are already familiar with the tools to pull or push changes for application deployments and managing Kubernetes operations.

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What is an API? A brief introduction

API stands for Application Programming Interface. It acts as a simple interface that allows two applications to talk to each other, where communication is initiated by one application/end. Let’s understand this using a simple analogy, and I am sure you are aware of Skyscanner or Trivago’s website, which lets you find and compare all the flights and hotels based on your needs. Have you ever given a thought to this, how it works? How can Skyscanner retrieve all the flight’s details along with its price between specified source and destination? Or How Trivago can compare all the hotels across all the websites? It’s where API comes into the picture. Assume it’s not for this API, then an operator at the Skyscanner or Trivago has to email every airline or Hotel company to get their price list. So anytime we want to book a flight or hotel, we open the Skyscanner website, and we fill in all the required details, and boom, we see the information of all the available flights. In the background, an API call is made to all the Airlines company whose result is shown on the Skyscanner website.

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No-Ops – Next Evolution or Fuss?

Will the so-called “DevOps” be replaced with another buzz word, NoOps? So, what exactly is NoOps, and will this be the next evolution or just an exaggerated practice. Let’s find out.

What is NoOps

NoOps means No Operations, i.e., remove all operations tasks and reduce the resistance between Development (Dev) and Infrastructure (Ops) teams. The primary goal of NoOps is to build a process where everything can be deployed in an automated fashion by Developers from the infrastructure to the application.

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Beginner’s Guide to Hybrid Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has evolved in past years and with rising customer needs the organizations are exploring multiple options to meet the demands and this has given rise to one of the most used Cloud Computing Technology i.e. Hybrid Cloud. It’s a type of computing environment that combines Public and Private clouds to reap the benefits of both. An Application and all its components share the resources between one or more public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft’s Azure, etc. and private clouds, on-premises infrastructure. Hybrid Cloud technology provides greater flexibility by leveraging the public cloud for high computing needs and private cloud for sensitive and business-critical workloads. Hence, it’s often-called “Best of Both Worlds”.

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