Forcing MFA in Amazon Web Services

24th of November, 2016 / / No Comments

Many organisations will want to enforce MFA for an added security layer for their users. As each service is different, in some cases enforcing MFA may not be as easy as it sound.
In AWS, an administrator cannot simply “tick” to enable MFA on all users (as of this writing). However, MFA can be enforced on API calling, to “force” a user to setup MFA. Think of it as a backdoor, to forcing or enabling MFA on all your IAM users.… [Keep reading] “Forcing MFA in Amazon Web Services”

Ubuntu security hardening for the cloud.

Hardening Ubuntu Server Security For Use in the Cloud

26th of October, 2016 / / 1 Comment

The following describes a few simple means of improving Ubuntu Server security for use in the cloud. Many of the optimizations discussed below apply equally to other Linux based distribution although the commands and settings will vary somewhat.

Azure cloud specific recommendations

  1. Use private key and certificate based SSH authentication exclusively and never use passwords.
  2. Never employ common usernames such as root , admin or administrator.
  3. Change the default public SSH port away from 22.
… [Keep reading] “Hardening Ubuntu Server Security For Use in the Cloud”

Are There Sufficient Standards in Cloud Computing Today?

26th of October, 2016 / / No Comments

The hybrid cloud may be a hot topic with adoption growing faster than ever but should we be concerned about a lack of established standards?

What is the Hybrid Cloud?

Private clouds, whether owned or leased, generally consist of closed IT infrastructures accessible only to a business which then makes available resources to it’s own internal customers. Private clouds are often home to core applications where control is essential to the business, they can also offer economies of scales where companies can afford larger, long term investments and have the ability to either run these environments themselves or pay for a managed service.… [Keep reading] “Are There Sufficient Standards in Cloud Computing Today?”

Viewing AWS CloudFormation and bootstrap logs in CloudWatch

30th of August, 2016 / / No Comments

Mature cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure have simplified infrastructure provisioning with toolsets such as CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to provide an easy way to create and manage a collection of related infrastructure resources. Both tool sets allow developers and system administrators to use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to specify resources to provision, as well as provide the means to bootstrap systems, effectively allowing for single click fully configured environment deployments.

While these toolsets are an excellent means to prevent RSI from performing repetitive monotonous tasks, the initial writing and testing of templates and scripts can be incredibly time consuming.… [Keep reading] “Viewing AWS CloudFormation and bootstrap logs in CloudWatch”

Migrating resources from AWS to Microsoft Azure

22nd of August, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Kloud receives a lot of communications in relation to the work we do and the content we publish on our blog. My colleague Hugh Badini recently published a blog about Azure deployment models from which we received the following legitimate follow up question…

So, Murali, thanks for letting us know you’d like to know more about this… consider this blog a starting point :).… [Keep reading] “Migrating resources from AWS to Microsoft Azure”

AWS CloudFormation AWS::RDS::OptionGroup Unknown option: Mirroring

17th of August, 2016 / / No Comments

Amazon recently announced Multi-AZ support for SQL Server in Sydney, which provides high availability for SQL RDS instances using SQL Server mirroring technology. In an effort to make life simpler for myself, I figured I’d write a CloudFormation template for future provisioning requests, however it wasn’t as straight forward as I’d expected.

I began by trying to guess my way through the JSON resources, based on what I’d already knew for MySQL deployments. I figured the MultiAZ property was still relevant, so I hacked together a template and attempted to provision the stack, which failed, indicating the following error:

CREATE_FAILED        |  Invalid Parameter Combination: MultiAZ property cannot be used with SQL Server DB instances, use the Mirroring option in an option group associated with the DB instance instead.… [Keep reading] “AWS CloudFormation AWS::RDS::OptionGroup Unknown option: Mirroring”

Building .NET Core Application on Amazon Linux

31st of May, 2016 / / 1 Comment

In order to run .NET applications on Linux operating systems, Mono used to be the only option. Now, Microsoft has released .NET Core that can build and run .NET applications on any OS including Windows, OSX and Linux. In this post, we are going to install both .NET Core Framework RC1 and RC2, build and run a simple Hello World application, and compare RC1 to RC2.

Installing .NET Core RC1

By following the official document, Installing ASP.NET… [Keep reading] “Building .NET Core Application on Amazon Linux”

Creating a simple nodejs API on AWS (including nginx)

26th of November, 2015 / / 3 Comments

On a recent project I was part of a team developing an AngularJS website with a C# ASP.NET backend API hosted in Azure.  It was a great project as I got to work with a bunch of new tools, but it got me wondering on how simple it could be to use a Javascript API instead.  That way the entire development stack would be written in Javascript.

And so a personal project was born.  To create a simple JS API and get it running in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Creating a simple nodejs API on AWS (including nginx)”

AWS Direct Connect in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange

21st of July, 2015 / / 5 Comments

I discussed Azure ExpressRoute via Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX) in my previous blog. In this post I am going to focus on AWS Direct Connect which ECX also provides. This means you can share the same physical link (1GBps or 10GBps) between Azure and AWS!

ECX also provides connectivity service to AWS for connection speed less than 1GBps. AWS Direct Connect provides dedicated, private connectivity between your WAN or datacenter and AWS services such as AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).… [Keep reading] “AWS Direct Connect in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange”

Create AWS CloudFormation Templates with Visual Studio

18th of May, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Background

AWS CloudFormation is a wonderful service for automating your AWS builds – my colleagues have done a number of detailed walk-throughs in other blog posts.

AWS also provides a toolkit for Visual Studio as an extension of the IDE.  To get started, configure the extension with your AWS IAM Access Key ID and Secret Key and you will be able to use the new AWS explorer pane to explore all AWS services such as VPC, EC2, RDS, etc.… [Keep reading] “Create AWS CloudFormation Templates with Visual Studio”