Chris Farris

AWS S3 Bucket security has been in the news a lot recently. Almost 200 million records on US Voters were found on an unsecured S3 bucket owned by a GOP data analytics firm. A third-party vendor to Verizon left 14 million customer records (including SSN partials) publicly readable. Then Dow Jones exposed 2 to 4 million customer records. AWS has responded to this spate of bad press with a several changes to the AWS Console, and most recently took the extra-ordinary step of emailing account owners informing of any publicly readable buckets.

Anyone who follows my blog (and that’s none of you) would notice I rarely find time to post. Since moving my blog from Linode to AWS EC2 a few years ago I’ve spent way more time patching WordPress than writing in it. MySQL would run out of memory and crash, leaving my blog down for days on end. I never use the bloggy features of Wordpress since the only folks who ever commented were spammers.

New employer uses Terraform, so I’ve finally had a reason to grok Terraform and what it can do. I’m not convinced it is better than CloudFormation. Here are my thoughts on it. Pros Terraform can manage more than just AWS Resources. Useful if you need to orchestrate across multiple clouds, but I’d fear the dependency issues there. At my ex-job I’d have been very interested in how Terraform could control both AWS and Chef.