- 2023-03-13 Monitor recency of your systems with CloudWatch
In the previous post we created a Datadog check and monitor to keep track of how many packages can be upgraded on our systems, when was the last time we rebooted the system and what is the major release of the operating system. Today, we will replicate the same metrics...
- 2023-03-03 Monitor if your systems are up to date with Datadog
Updating your systems, especially those that are constantly connected to the Internet, is very important from a security standpoint. Currently, state of the art, cloud-native solution is to use containers and orchestrators such as Docker and Kubernetes. There's also an option to use virtual machines and images, made with Packer...
- 2023-02-21 Deploy SmartFox Server using Ansible - Part 4
In this post we will go through the process of converting the playbook from the previous posts into a reusable role. At the last step, we will go through the process of publishing the role in Ansible Galaxy. The finished process is [available here](https://galaxy.ansible.com/ppabis/smartfox). ...
- 2023-02-11 Scheduled sslscan with GitLab and Docker
In this post, we will schedule a scan of our website with `sslscan` using GitLab CI and Docker. We will also use a custom Docker image to run the scan and store the results in a file. We will also create a stage to analyze the results from the scan...
- 2023-02-01 Deploy SmartFox Server using Ansible - Part 3
Previously we adapted our playbook to configure more aspects of SmartFox like ports, copying Zone files and extensions. In this post, let's make the playbook support more platforms, namely RedHat based systems, like AlmaLinux, and ARM CPU systems, like AWS Graviton. We will also fix an issue where SmartFox archive...
- 2023-01-20 Deploy SmartFox Server using Ansible - Part 2
In the previous post, we created a playbook with which we could deploy SmartFox server on a Debian/Ubuntu machine. It contained basic configuration like admin username, password and SSL certificate parameters. In this part, we are going to extend the playbook and make it more configurable. If you didn't...
- 2023-01-02 Deploy SmartFox Server using Ansible - Part 1
SmartFoxServer is a software that acts as a framework for building backend for online games. It lets game developers to focus on the gameplay, while SmartFox takes care of connection, authentication, room management, in-game chat, etc. It is very simple to install and configure. I shouldn't need to introduce Ansible...
- 2023-01-01 Scared of terraform apply? Use AWS Organizations!
So you got your new job as a sole DevOps Engineer. Congratulations! For the first months your roam around your company's AWS. You see all the manually created EC2 instances, RDS databases, Elastic Load Balancers, etc. Well, they say a better practice is to use Infrastructure as Code than to...