Aws

What fits somewhere in between re:Invent and Community Day events? That would be the AWS Summits! This year, I got to experience a double dose of fun by representing Alkira at our booth and presenting at the AWS Community Developer Lounge. I may be biased, but I believe the Alkira team is the best in the world.

Usually, when it comes to technology, my grandmother doesn’t know much because she doesn’t care. What is the cloud? How to install a new browser on her laptop? What is 2FA? I might be speaking French to her as I discuss these things. Yet, she knows what ChatGPT is. This shows the vast amount of publicity, hype, and polarization that has ensued since November 2022. I tend to avoid AI fear-mongering and focus more on, how could a tool like this help enhance my daily grind? Can ChatGPT write Terraform as elegantly as a poem written from the perspective of Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction? Let’s take it for a spin on AWS using infrastructure-as-code.

In Part 1, we talked about the origins of the Site-to-Site VPN Service in AWS. As consumers began to scale in the early days, they faced tunnel sprawl, performance constraints, and the need for a simplified design. AWS responded with Transit Gateway. How did Transit Gateway simplify architecture leading to smoother operations, better network performance, and a scalable blueprint for the future network?

As far as tech conferences are concerned, it’s hard to find one as exciting as AWS re:Invent. Whether it’s anticipation for new product announcements or connecting in person with the community, there is something electrifying about being at ground zero. And if you can make the trip, you will get a lot of great exercise too! I hit close to 100K steps or approx. 43 miles according to my Fitbit. What were some of my favorite highlights from re:Invent 2022?

The necessity for protocols to keep communication secure has been around since the dawn of the internet. The first ever VPN was jointly developed by a vendor consortium (which included Microsoft) in 1996, and came in the form of Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol. Although many are skeptical about the value of VPNs in 2022 and beyond, customer consumption of cloud provider VPN services have paved the way for additional features and exponential scale.

Blowing out cloud spend is an easy thing to do. This McKinsey Report notes that 80% of enterprises consider managing cloud spend a challenge. I recently presented at the Cloud Security Alliance in Kansas City and had the opportunity to network with some tremendous DevOps and Security professionals. One excellent side conversation somehow transitioned to a deep discussion on better ways to understand cost implications in the era of infrastructure-as-code. Shouldn’t cost be someone else’s problem?

Optional attributes for object type constraints is almost here! I’ve been waiting for this feature to come along for a while. I have tested it extensively in -alpha, and I can confidently confirm that it is a game changer. This feature is long in the making, being discussed as far back as this thread in 2018. Today, it is now in beta, so the official release could be any day now. Let’s demonstrate how this is useful and build some common AWS infrastructure.

I had the opportunity to present at the 4th annual AWS Community Day for the Midwest in June. This event was planned, organized, and delivered by AWS user group leaders and was an absolute blast. I got to catch up with a few remarkable individuals I haven’t talked to since pre-pandemic, and I got to meet many new people and listen to their stories of transformation in their respective enterprises.

In Part 1, we started with a scalable foundation that can adapt over time as the business grows and adjusts to changing markets. With Alkira’s Network Cloud, we take a cloud native approach in enabling our customer’s transformation. No appliances need to be provisioned in remote VPCs or VNets, and no agents need to be installed on workloads. Getting started is as easy as kicking off a build pipeline. For Part 2, let’s connect some networks from AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Effectively automating infrastructure is no longer a luxury but a staple in the enterprise move through future transformation. I wrote a blog recently about using Terraform with Packer together, and wanted to take this thought further with breaking down Terraform Modules and getting well connected with Terraform Cloud. I recently put together a simple module for building base infrastructure in AWS for the purpose of testing Alkira Network Cloud. Let’s dive in!

Introduction # Multi-Cloud is making its rounds. Network and Security engineers face increasing challenges with managing complexity and risk as they work to react with more agility to enable business outcomes. At the start, enterprises didn’t just decide they would be multi-cloud. They started with a single cloud, likely Amazon Web Services and tailored their strategy around that cloud’s architecture and features.