Help Everyone Do Better Security

One interesting thing about the contrast between infrastructure and security is the expectation of open-source software. When a common problem arises we all experience, a company will launch a product to solve this problem. In infrastructure, typically the core tool is open-source and free to use, with some value-add services…

Can We Make Idiot-Proof Infrastructure pt1?

One complaint I hear all the time online and in real life is how complicated infrastructure is. You either commit to a vendor platform like ECS, Lightsail, Elastic Beanstalk or Cloud Run or you go all in with something like Kubernetes. The first are easy to run but lock you…

Terraform is dead; Long live Pulumi?

The best tools in tech scale. They're not always easy to learn, they might take some time to get good with but once you start to use them they just stick with you forever. On the command line, things like gawk and sed jump to mind, tools that…

Adventures in IPv6 Part 2

As I discussed in Part 1 I've converted this site over to pure IPv6. Well at least as pure as I could get away with. I still have some problems though, chief among them that I cannot send emails with the Ghost CMS. I've switched from…

IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

IP addresses have been in the news a lot lately and not for good reasons. AWS has announced they are charging $.005 per IPv4 address per hour, joining other cloud providers in charging for the luxury of a public IPv4 address. GCP charges $.004, same with Azure and Hetzner charges…

Serverless Functions Post-Mortem

Around 2016, the term "serverless functions" started to take off in the tech industry. In short order, it was presented as the undeniable future of infrastructure. It's the ultimate solution to redundancy, geographic resilience, load balancing and autoscaling. Never again would we need to patch, tweak…