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  • 5 min read

A quick overview of the ephemeral resources and write-only feature in Terraform 1.11+

Mr.Jack

Boardgame

The night drapes the gloomy alleys in a veil of darkness. Jack moves silently through the shadows. The finest investigators of the gaslight era have gathered to catch him—before he slips away forever under cover of night.

Mr. Jack is a two-player deduction game where one player takes on the role of Mr. Jack, attempting to escape the city and erase all traces of his presence, while the other player controls the investigators working to unmask and capture him.

Each turn, players move characters, activate their unique abilities, and position them in either shadow or light. At the end of every round, witnesses reveal whether Jack remains visible—or has once again vanished into the darkness. For more information, visit: boardgamegeek

This short blog post explores ephemeral resources and the new write-only arguments introduced in Terraform v1.11.0. As you may know, Terraform stores all values—including sensitive ones like secrets—in plain text within the state file. While best practices recommend securing the state file , it’s now possible to go a step further: you can prevent secrets from being stored in the state file at all.

In this post, we’ll walk through a practical use case that shows how to securely pass secret values in your Terraform configuration using these new features—without leaving any trace in the state file.

  • 6 min read

A quick guide to enable S3 native state locking in Terraform 1.11.0

Planet-X

Boardgame

At the outskirts of our solar system, a mysterious planet might be hiding. In The Search for Planet X, each player takes on the role of an astronomer trying to locate the hidden planet, known as Planet X. It is a deduction game where players gather clues, and as more objects are discovered, they narrow down the possible locations of Planet X. For more information, visit: boardgamegeek

In August 2024, AWS introduced AWS S3 conditional writes, a feature that prevents objects from being overwritten when uploading data. This enhancement allowed Terraform to eliminate the need for consensus mechanisms to lock state file writing on S3 objects. Finally, this feature has been officially added to Terraform as General Availability (GA) in version v1.11.0 this week. This blog post provides a quick guide on enabling S3 native state locking in Terraform 1.11.0.

  • 9 min read

Unpacking My AWS re:Invent 2024

Radlands

I decided to write this blog post as a way to memorialize my trip to AWS re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas. I also hope it serves as a helpful guide for anyone planning to attend re:Invent for the first time in the coming years.

AWS re:Invent was an unbelievable experience. It’s not just the biggest AWS event but arguably one of the largest technology events in the world.

The conference is gigantic in scale: over 60,000 attendees in Las Vegas, more than 1,900 sessions, and 3,500 speakers. Just looking at these numbers proves how massive the conference is, and it underscores the importance of being well-prepared. You can’t just show up and expect to stumble upon great opportunities. If you want to make the most of it, preparation is key—and this blog post is here to help!

  • 13 min read

Plan for Unsuccessful Changes; A Use Case of the AWS Health API

Radlands

Boardgame

Radlands is a fast-paced card game where you lead a tribe of survivors in a harsh post-apocalyptic world. Your tribe has settled near a rare water source and uses strange old technology from abandoned military experiments to stay alive. Other tribes want your water and are preparing to attack. To win, you’ll need to use your cards wisely, protect your three camps, and perform regular healthchecks to ensure their survival. If all your camps are destroyed, you lose. Radlands is all about strategy, survival, and fierce battles. For more information, visit: boardgamegeek

Resiliency: A Shared Responsibility in the Cloud

This blog post is inspired by the Chalk Talk session titled ARC317 - Operational Excellence: Best Practices for Resilient Systems from AWS re:Invent 2024. You can explore the presentation deck on the AWS events content.

According to the AWS Well-Architected Framework, resiliency is defined as the ability of a system to recover from failures caused by load, attacks, or internal faults. These failures can stem from various sources, such as hardware malfunctions, software bugs, operational errors, or environmental disruptions.

In the cloud era, ensuring resiliency is not solely the responsibility of cloud consumers. Instead, it operates on a shared responsibility model, where both cloud providers and customers play critical roles.

  • 9 min read

Run Amazon Linux on your infrastructure

The Grizzled

Boardgame

French soldiers, on the front lines, promise each other that they’ll survive to come back all together no matter what happens. Without ever touching on the warlike aspect, “The Grizzled” offers each player the chance to feel some of the difficulties suffered by the soldiers in the trenches. Thus the emotions around the table will often be intense.

The Grizzled is a cooperative game about survival in the trenches during the first World War where players win or lose together.Players take turns either playing cards from their hand, representing threats like mortar shells or negative personality traits, or opting out of the mission. Successful progress depends on correctly playing threat cards. Too many occurrences of a threat result in mission failure, highlighting the need for planning, teamwork, and a touch of luck. For more information, visit: boardgamegeek

There is still a significant demand for running services on virtual machines. In the realm of the AWS cloud, utilizing AWS EC2 emerges as the prime choice for VM deployment. AWS offers a wide array of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) suitable for installation on EC2 instances. However, AWS also presents a tailored Linux AMI known as Amazon Linux, which is crafted to furnish a stable, secure, and high-performance execution environment for applications hosted on EC2.

Setting up an Ubuntu machine on a personal computer or a homelab server is a straightforward process. One simply needs to download the appropriate image tailored to their virtualization environment and initiate the VM. However, the question arises: How does one setup AWS Linux locally, facilitating testing and exploration of the image without incurring the additional expense of provisioning an EC2 instance on AWS?

This blog post elucidates the steps required to configure AWS Linux within your local environment, thereby obviating the need for EC2 provisioning and facilitating cost-effective experimentation and testing.