Declarative vs. Imperative Infrastructure As Code

Not all infrastructure as code is born equal. Some styles of infrastructure as code give us great benefits — whereas other kinds can cause a lot of headache.

Writing good infrastructure as code doesn’t mean simply bundling code that creates infrastructure into a repository and walking away. Knowing the in declarative vs. imperative infrastructure as code can mean the difference between having an easy life or a total nightmare.

By the end of this article you’ll know what the difference is between declarative and imperative infrastructure as code, why it matters and when you should use each. 

AWS access keys — 5 Tips To Safely Use Them.

AWS Access Keys are how you can programatically access the AWS cloud. AWS Access Keys can be used to provision, update — or even delete cloud resources. When it comes to your cloud account, personal or work you don’t want your account to be compromised — it could cost you at a minimum thousands of pounds. So keeping your AWS Access Keys safe is paramount.

Managing your AWS Access keys isn’t as scary as it first seems. With a little knowledge you can experiment and build software in the cloud, all whilst staying safe.

By the end of this article you should know what AWS keys are, why they’re important and five tips you can use to make sure you’re safe when using your access keys.

Learn The 6 Fundamentals Of Terraform — In Less Than 20 Minutes

Terraform is a really useful tool when it comes to learning cloud engineering. In my opinion Terraform will become as ubiquitous for infrastructure provisioning as tools like git are for version control.

Terraform

Today we’re going to talk about the 6 key fundamentals topics you need to know in order to get working with Terraform quickly. We won’t be covering the concepts in great depth (a good thing!) but we’ll just enough so that you’re aware of what the concept is and how it works before you go diving deep.

By the end of this article you’ll be aware of the 6 key concepts of Terraform, everything from the language to how to structure your files.

The Big List Of Cloud Native Engineering Resources

I spend a lot of time researching Cloud Native technologies. Also whilst editing the Cloud Native Software Engineering Newsletter I’m always looking for the best sources of knowledege and high quality content. Everything on the list is things I read, people I follow or books I’ve read. I’m not recommending anything I haven’t used.

By the end of this article you’ll know about the best Cloud Native resources that I’ve found to-date. Make sure to come back as I’ll be constantly updating this page! 

AWS networking fundamentals: A simple guide for software engineers.

Have you ever been into the AWS console and been completely baffled about all the concepts and jargon? You’ve got: Security Groups, Inbound rules, VPC’s, Subnets, Internet Gateways, NAT, ENI’s and all of them are related to networking somehow. Put simply: there’s a lot to AWS networking. So if you’re going to break into it somehow you need to know what to focus on: the fundamentals.

Today we’re going to be going through the main networking components you should be familiar with in AWS. We’ll talk you through why you’d need the component, what it is and how you’d use it. Throughout the article we’ll be building up an example of running a web server in a public subnet as part of our own VPC.

By the end of this article you’ll understand the main networking concepts: Private IP’s, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Classless Inter Domain Routing (CIDR), Subnets, Internet Gateways and Security Groups and use these to implement a basic network design.