#aws - February 2019

in ECS, with autodiscovery ALB.. is it possible to set the subdomain name to be different from the service name?

I’ve been trying to figure out how to ‘architect’ the stack for our apps. we have 4 different services. This is a Ruby on Rails stack.
- 1. the main app, public dns,
- 2. auth, public dns.
- 3 background scheduler - private dns needs to be accessible from main app.
- 4. another app with private dns to be accessible by main app.

Fargate, RDS, elasticache.
--
I guess i need two ALBs. one private, and one public.

— questions —
Is there any advantage/benefit to throwing Traefik in there somewhere?
- if so, what would the stack look like (a secondary ecs cluster just for traefik? or stick traefik in the same cluster as the apps?)

Is there a tutorial / guide on how to use SSM Parameter Store to get ENVVARS into each task/container on deploy?

@i5okie this sounds like a pretty contained app, I’m not sure what Traefik would add to it being more of an edge proxy

so just the dual ALB public and private?

Is auth an internal app in the above?

yeah just a microservice type thing

yeah make that an internal alb

thank you

Anyone using 99designs/aws-vault with packer? set the variables to use the aws env vars

    "aws_access_key": "{{env `AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID`}}",
    "aws_secret_key": "{{env `AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY`}}",

but aws just spits it back out Build 'amazon-ebs' errored: error validating regions: AuthFailure: AWS was not able to validate the provided access credentials 99 aws-vault

Works fine with terraform though 🤔

more confused after poking through other peoples shit in github as they're using the same thing.

We are looking for implementing transit vpc. Most third party solutions (Cisco, Aviatrix etc.) are expensive. Has anyone used AWS transit gateway? If yes, how was the experience?

https://aws.amazon.com/transit-gateway/ -

We decided not to use because of the increased cost over using VPC peering

I see

In our case there are multiple vpc and giving vpn access to Transit VPC makes more sense

So evaluating this option

It simplifies things but at additional cost for all traffic. So depends use case, If only for user VPN, it could make sense. But we needed that as well as apps going cross accounts for shared resources

You may find this useful:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/vpc-sharing-a-new-approach-to-multiple-accounts-and-vpc-management

Thanks

Hello, I'm looking to vpc sharing as a way to reduce VPN costs, but I already implemented a vpc transit solution using FRR with BGP and Strongswan (IPsec) https://frrouting.org/

How does VPC Sharing fit in with the practice of having separate AWS accounts for each environment? As an example, would it be a bad idea to share a VPC between Staging and Production?

@Igor VPC sharing is not meant to be cross environment. The idea is to a) centralize management/billing from one account 2) make account boundaries transparent per environment. So for example if dev environment has components spread across multiple AWS accounts then all those components can be part of a single VPC (which earlier required separate VPC)

@Pablo Costa I am curious how are you creating/updating transit vpc. Does Strongswan give any tools to do it or you are manually (from aws console or terraform) creating all required routing?

This looks pretty cool

Hey, did anyone upgrade dc1 to dc2 redshift clusters using Cloudformation? I know there are 2 paths using snapshot-restore and elastic resizing but I don’t want to cause a drift from CF state doing it manually and I wonder if CF does handle the upgrade in a data-loss-less way

FYI if anyone is interested upon dc1 to dc2 redshift upgrade via cloudformation data is being migrated. the only thing to remember is that during the migration cluster is available only in read only mode

Morning People, anyone can help me with how ECS decides to place the tasks when multiple ordered_placement_strategy blocks are used?
Given the following example:
I've 4 tasks ( dockers ) and 2 machines in 2 different AZs

ordered_placement_strategy {
    type  = "spread"
    field = "attribute:ecs.availability-zone"
  }

  ordered_placement_strategy {
    field = "memory"
    type  = "binpack"
  }

Will ECS stop bringing tasks up because it won't be able to do so because the first placement block says different AZ or something entirely different will happen?
Anyone got any ideas ?

The cloudfront docs on which types of certs are valid is very confusing
It seems you can use an ECC cert between cloudfront <---> origin
but only an RSA cert between viewer <---> cloudfront
but i can't find this explicitly stated anywhere

hrm…. not something we’ve run in to

(that said, we have some modules for cloudfront and acm)

do you observe RDS hostname resolution issues in us-east-1?

When you waste time writing code around aws config ... then look at the pricing. 😬

@chrism Wrote https://github.com/alphagov/pay-aws-compliance a while back to help with auditing of AWS resources (and some others) - run as a scheduled Lambda - cheap!

currently running https://github.com/toniblyx/prowler

which is pretty nice

I'll add the alpha gov one to my list 😄

Prowler looks pretty full featured, but bash! 😮

Well we run it via teamcity within docker and output the report as an artifact 😛

plops it in a report tab; though I need to look at the background colour of the html at some point.

Nice

Can hook up Lambdas to SNS to send email reports etc too

cuts down on the drudgery

It's a nice tool 😄

Looks good 👌

Drowning in things analysing aws; though Im yet to get anything of value from GuardDuty beyond 3rd parties appreciating it as a tick box 🙄

Never looked at GuardDuty

It’s impossible to keep up with all the AWS services hah

they certainly dont miss a trick; just wish they'd have a chat with other areas of aws before building them 😛

annoying levels of disconnect between products; you set your multi region cloudtrail... and they bring out guard duty that has to be enabled in each regions. Oh and you can hook it up to another account so you can read from your root account the guard duty events of prod/testing etc.... but you have to do it per region, per account via invites 😬

... one of those moments you terraform the creation and realise you're going to have to go hand-ball all the invite acceptance

They almost got it right, but then didnt 😄

Pretty cheap though compared to most aws things so it has that going for it

meh think i'll just configure the hell out of existing scanners. AWS configs one of those things that looks like it'll drive me up the f'ing wall rather than save me time 🤣

I was looking at https://github.com/cloudposse/terraform-aws-cloudwatch-flow-logs but it doesnt seem to fit with the ref-architecture way of splitting audit off / storing to s3. its just flowlog>kinesis>CW

its kinda either or; I may be overthinking this

Not sure on that one tbh, but have you looked at flowlogs or thought about what you wanna do with them?

Have used mainly as a checkbox exercise before

Creating/managing alerts/dashboards with them is quite expensive in terms of mgmt cost

Yeah tbh the idea seems utterly pointless for the most point

tickboxes for everyone

Lets put it this way, if you're having to dig into tb's of flow logs to find evidence of something; you've missed a bigger step elsewhere 😄

How else are you going to find out how much data was exfiltrated from your environment for realz?!

nothing like a terraform-github safari to find how other people dealt with stuff, and realising you've been here before

lol

reaches for the star
already starred

seriously though, storing flowlogs in something like $LOGGING_SAAAS_PROVIDER generates so much data, is not cheap to do anything proactive with the data

cloudwatch would be cheaper but limited

More worrying is when our SIEM tool hooks on, and reprocesses the same data 😐️

You know your siem monitoring is worth the cash when you terraform up 30 machines in vsphere; tear them all down and they alert you a day later 🤣

Well worth the email notification at 7am on a saturday

well at least guard duty covers the ex-filtration side; though id be interested to know how that works if its someones shitty app code being abused to haul data out

my feeling is it wouldnt notice

Bet it won't pick up exfiltrating to an attacker owned S3 bucket

"its in aws, everything is awesome"

best place to pull data to; aws would take an age to lock you out and the transfers that fast you've less chance of the owner locking you out before you get it

Need to watch out for that too if using S3 endpoints and aren't locking down your buckets it bypasses any egress proxies you may have in place

Found that out during a pentest :D

we only really have public stuff in buckets; outside of the whole snowplow usage and thats all anonomised noise

keeping data in SAAS, aka flick switch for encryption, flick switch for firewall, flick switch for logs 😄

after years of terraform its nice at times to be able to keep shit pretty secure and not have to spend days tweaking bollocks to get there 😛

I need to look at s3 bucket security again as they love to change things

The UI change was nice, more explicit options to not allow buckets to become public by accident

Don't wholly understand why they're terrified of making it default-on

the IAM stuff around S3 is pretty powerful; ridiculously so compared to Azures

yeah but too many folks left things open which leads to breaches

I mean why they don't default it to most secure and make people open it up. They've made the UI better but it wont stop people doing dumb shit

I mean I know it wont
I'm still sat skimming tls updates for bucket names

ah, hadn’t spent too much time poking in the UI recently

our original account is old as f'; so where no terraform lives, one has to spelunk in aws ui.

Compared to azure portal though everythings a dream

hah, so I’ve heard

I imagine its where the Windows 8 UI creator ended up as punishment

terraform and azure sounded like a dream come true
then I used it in anger for a month
lots of anger
lots and lots

3 machine cluster
22minutes... still not complete
TIMES THE HELL OUT

wasn't very impressive 😄

I have been getting a lot of We currently do not have sufficient {instance-type} capacity in the Availability Zone you requested {zone}. messages in EC2. Is this common? Does AWS address these capacity issues?

this is where RIs help 😃

...as they provide capacity reservations

@Igor can't say we've been seeing it lately, but it highly depends on (a) the region you're operating in (b) the type of instance

for example, we've seen this in the past when AWS has had a regional zone failure in a region and everyone auto scales out to the other zones

So I need to purchase RIs for the specific AZ?

At least that's something 🙂

@Erik Osterman (Cloud Posse) Do you know if there is a way to attach the RIs to an ASG? I purchased a couple, but they seem to immediately be used up on existing running instances.. which makes sense in retrospect

RIs are not a directly addressable resource from the EC2 perspective

it's a billing instrument

Yeah, but when it comes to capacity

I want PROD instances to take priority over non-PROD, if that makes sense

but they are not running in the same account, right? so that won't happen 😏

i am not sure how to prioritize RI capacity reservations within an account

It's a legacy pre-SweetOps account 😉

I am locked for some customers due to not being able to move around NAT elastic IPs, and whitelisting changes are a pain

#HarshRealityOps ?

yea, there are in the end always some things outside of our control

the NAT IP thing comes up regularly

has anyone seen something to enforce arbitrary limits on the number of specific kinds of resources which match a given tag?

basically a policy enforcement engine for aws which would let us say untagged instances are automatically destroyed

if the count of instances with tag Developer=foobar, is greater than X, then alert

if the count of instances with tag Developer=baz is greater than Y, then kill until less than Z

something like https://github.com/RiotGames/cloud-inquisitor

If you setup WSL via the store (as they say you should now) geodesic fails to map the path 😬 🔫
It assumes its still in the local/lxss when in reality its in AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.Ubuntu18.04onWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc

Guess this needs to be smarter 😄

joys of changing

infact

simpler

the if/else just needs reversing; check for canonical ... but i imagine that might have unexpected consiquences

or msft need to stop being random af

I'm taking the lazy way out and just blowing the folder away seeing ms' command for removing lxss full didn't actually do what anyone of reasonably sound mind would call "FULLY remove"

kinda stuff that makes you think ubuntu desktop maybe the future; then you remember how much that blows 😄

AWS v2 providers out

aka as good a time as any to add that version = "1.60.0" to your provider 🤣

@chrism any chance we could get your help improving that path extrapolation? I'd be happy to jump on a call

Think it might be worth a ticket on WSL to add some sort of inbuilt var of winpath

He asks, and the lord microsoft giveth

already exists

wslpath -wa . in WSL returns the windows path to the current folder

Been around a while too

I shall give that a stab

https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/3146 instafail