Introduction Blackbox Exporter is an exporter for the Prometheus monitoring system. It is able to probe a target, such as a host or an application from the outside. Blackbox Exporter does probing with modules such as http, tcp, dns, icmp and grpc (details here). The icmp module is special because it does privileged operations that […]
Introduction Amazon RDS is a relational database service available on Amazon Web Services. It is essentially a managed database server with a volume for the data. Both cost money. Having a large dataset is not the only reason have big volume: the volume size determines the number of I/O operations (IOPS) the volume can do. […]
Introduction The Keycloak Authorization Services allows you to offload your application's authorization decisions to Keycloak instead of implementing them in your code. This way you can leverage Keycloak's advanced features like 2FA without any additional development on your part. If you're unfamiliar with the Authorization Services I suggest having a look at the Keycloak authorization […]
Introduction There's no substitute for understanding what you're doing, and that in turn is difficult without seeing what is happening. Debugging Keycloak OIDC problems without understanding what is happening under the hood is no exception to this rule. The purpose of this article is twofold: For the purposes of this blog post I've been using […]
Introduction Keycloak Authorization Services are built on top of well-known standards such as the OAuth2 and User-Managed Access specifications (UMA). You can manage Keycloak Authorization Services programmatically, if needed, as described in our other blog post. OAuth2 clients (such as front end applications) can obtain access tokens from the server using the token endpoint and […]
Introduction Let's Encrypt and the ACME protocol enable getting free (as in beer) TLS/SSL certificates. The main use for Let's Encrypt is to enable HTTPS on web servers. Let's Encrypt TLS certificates expire pretty quickly, in 3 months, but the idea is that renewal is automated so that you don't ever really have to worry […]
Introduction Prometheus is a widely used, cloud-native open source monitoring solution. Its alerting component is called Alertmanager, which can send alerts to email, Slack and elsewhere. Both Prometheus and Alertmanager fit very well into the infrastructure as code model as well. Twilio SMS is a SMS sending service with consumption-based pricing model with an extensive […]
Introduction Prometheus is a Cloud-native metrics platforms that is very easy to manage with infrastructure as code tools. Prometheus is often couple with Alertmanager which handles alerting and alert routing. AlertManager has good support for various alert transport (e.g. email or slack) but its alerting capabilities can be extended with custom webhooks. When AlertManager is […]
Kyllästyimme Edenred-korttien latauksen kankeuteen ja automatisoimme latausprosessin. Tässä artikkelissa kerrotaan, miten automaatio toteutettiin CSV-tiedostoilla ja ohjelmistorobotilla. Lisäksi artikkelista löytyy linkit GitHub-sivustollemme, josta voit ladata koodit käyttöösi. Edenred-korttien lataustapoja Edenred on yksi suurimmista suomalaisista työsuhde-etujen tarjoajista. Edenred tarjoaa fyysisiä ja virtuaalisia kortteja, joihin voidaan ladata työntekijöiden lounas-, virike- ja työmatkaetuja. Edenred-korttien lataamiseen on lukuisia tapoja, mutta […]
What does it do, this Keycloak thing? Dear seasoned keycloaker, as you probably know, Keycloak is a stable, scalable, programmable and otherwise killer platform to centralize all your identity, authentication and authorization needs. Keycloak supports fine-grained authorization policies using Keycloak authorization services. We highly recommend reading our Keycloak authorization services terminology article before this article. […]
Causes for the Terraform AWS UnauthorizedOperation errors Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool you can use to configure Cloud resources in AWS. When using Terraform AWS provider you frequently run into various UnauthorizedOperation errors when creating, modifying or deleting resources. That happens unless you do what you should not do and let Terraform use […]
Introduction AWS recommends that you disable S3 bucket ACLs for all new buckets. To understand why some background information is needed. AWS S3 providers two ways to manage access to S3 buckets and objects: AWS combines IAM policies and ACLs to figure out the effective access control rules for objects in an S3 bucket. The […]
What is Azure Private DNS? Azure Private DNS is a DNS service for Azure virtual networks. You can register a private DNS zone to Azure Private DNS and then link that zone with one or more virtual networks. If you enable DNS auto-registration for a virtual network, a new resource (e.g. virtual machines and VPN […]
We participated in Red Hat Open Tour 2022 Tallinn a while back. Johan Wennerberg, who is a Solution Architect for Red Hat Nordics in Stockholm, gave a presentation titled "Gain robust repeatability as self.service, by automating your automation". Among other things he discussed the importance and use-cases of Cloud infrastructure standardization and automation. Here I […]
This article shows you how to enable Azure Backup on Linux VMs. It is recommended to read the Understanding Azure Backup for Linux VMs article first before trying to enable backups with Terraform. Terraform AzureRM provider has three relevant resources: azurerm_linux_virtual_machine: parameters provision_vm_agent and allow_extension_operations should be true or enabling backups will fail (with or […]
Azure Backup is an Azure service that allows, among other things, backing up Windows and Linux VMs in Azure. The backups are essentially virtual machine snapshots, but backing up and/or restoring individual files is also possible. This article tries to explain how Azure Backup and Linux VMs interact and what is required for them to […]
The aws_instance resource in Terraform can automatically create the default network interface for you. There are cases, however, when you notice that the default network interface is not enough anymore, and modifying it via the limited aws_instance parameters is not sufficient. In these cases you can convert the interface into an aws_network_interface resource, but the […]
What are Keycloak realm keys? Keycloak's authentication protocols make use of private and public keys for signing and encrypting, as described in the official documentation. These keys are realm-specific, and by default managed internally in Keycloak. So, when you create a realm using the Keycloak Admin API, kcadm.sh or manually using the Web UI, new […]
Microsoft Azure has a nice service for scheduling tasks called Azure Automation. While Azure Automation is able to other things as well, such as being able to act as a Powershell DSC pull server, we'll focus on the runbooks and scheduling. Runbooks are scripts that do things, e.g. run maintenance and reporting tasks. Runbooks often, […]
Cloud-Init is "a standard for customizing" cloud instances, typically on their first boot. It is allows mixing state-based configuration management with imperative provisioning commands (details in our IaC article). By using cloud-init most of the annoyances of SSH-based provisioning can be avoided: Having to use (possibly shared) SSH keys for provisioning Having to have direct […]
