The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open-source software development framework to define your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. Last year, when AWS CDK made a splash, I tried it out for a couple of different projects and was amazed by how awesome (and a little intimidating, at first) it is. My CDK projects included: CDK CDN - A CDK project to setup CDN using S3 Bucket, CloudFront Distribution to make it easy to distribute your media Folding @ Home on AWS - A CDK project to bring up a compute stack on AWS using an auto-scaling group comprising of spot-based EC2 instances When I heard about CDK Day, I thought of giving back in some way and submitted my talks for CDK Day.

TL;DR Applying some Bash knowhow on exit codes, you can cut down the time required for a Terraform apply if no changes are to be done. The Simple Plan and Apply Over the past couple of weeks, I’d been working on getting our alerts deployed with Terraform. The initial proof of concept was a very simple shell script with a lot of copy-paste to handle the many accounts, environments and regions that I work on.

November end/December is a fairly exciting time for a lot of AWS enthusiasts - it’s time for re:Invent, AWSs’ annual event which brings in tens of thousands of AWS users, enthusiasts, power users, customers and more. For the AWS Heroes, it’s also the time to get together, talk, mingle, discuss and debate on all things AWS and more. It’s the time where we pack our bags and head off to Las Vegas.

I started blogging with WordPress about 13 years ago. I had some free time since the joining date for my first job was about a month or so away. Armed with boredom, an Internet connection and an ample amount of free time, I started Sathya Says on WordPress.com hosting. Soon after, I came to know about domains, shared hosting and self-hosted WordPress and with my first ever salary, purchased sathyasays.com, shared hosting and started writing about Linux experiences.

I had the privilege of being able to talk about what you can do to improve your Azure account security and improve the security posture of your workloads running on Azure as part of Microsoft For Startups’ Highway to a 100 Unicorns - Scale Up Thursdays webinar series. You can catch the video on demand by registering over at https://aka.ms/secgen. The slides are available on SpeakerDeck as well on my Talks section.

Folding@Home(aka FAH) is a distributed computing project. To quote from their website, FAH is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. Folding@Home involves you donating your spare computing power by running a small client on your computer. The client then contacts the Folding@Home Work Assignment server, gets some workunits and runs them, You can choose to have it run when only when your system is idle, or have it run all the time.

I’ve always dreamed of being at reInvent and this year, not only do I get to be at re:Invent, I also get a chance to lead a Dev Chat. I’m really excited to be there, to present and more importantly, to meet and interact with other AWS Heroes and re:Invent participants. Last year, I was honoured to being named as one of the Community Heroes and almost made it to re:Invent 2018.

A while back I had done a round up of a few container scanning solutions and had mentioned I wanted to take another look at Anchore. The past few days, I’ve been playing a bit with Anchore - this time, integrating it with Drone CI. Drone is a “Container-Native, Continuous Delivery Platform” built using Go. It makes use of a YAML file, .drone.yml to define and execute the pipeline. End Goal For this project, we will be integrating Drone and Anchore.

With a copy of the cover! So yeah that actually happened! I’ve always wanted to publish a book and thanks to Apress publishing - that is a reality now. The book is titled “Practical Docker With Python: Build, Release and Distribute your Python App with Docker” and is targeted at people who are new to Docker and want to containerize their application (with an example Python chat bot).

I recently published couple of articles elsewhere: How to Increase Container Security and Ward Off Threats - Adobe Tech Blog 5 OpenSource tools for container security - OpenSource.com Scanning Docker Images for Vulnerabilities with Aqua Microscanner - previously, on my blog Do give them a read.