Both of my children have been playing Minecraft for way too many years. Over time I’ve learnt bits and pieces, especially about running servers. As they have matured their requirements for servers have become more advanced and more often. So much so, I’ve been trying to get them to manage their own. Which has been a failure. The learning curve too steep. Which led me to build my own solution. Read more

In the last post I covered off how to create a REGIONAL WAF in CDK. In this post I’m going to create a CLOUDFRONT WAF. This is a little bit more involved. I’m going to assume that your application stack is not in us-east-1 and thus we’ll need to create another stack in us-east-1. This is going to use several of the tricks we discussed in an earlier post. Existing Let’s say you have an existing stack that has a CloudFront distribution in it. Read more

AWS CDK Doesn’t yet have a highlevel WAFv2 construct. Using the learnings I’ve recently discussed, I’ve created two constructs. One you can use for REGIONAL WAFs and one for CLOUDFRONT WAFs. AWS CDK seems to be moving towards an approach of having cross regional resources created via custom resources, but this doesn’t exist for WAF yet, and I’ve had mixed results. In this post we will first start with the REGIONAL solution. Read more

I love security and love to keep my systems security. I have been using capabilities such as SPF and DKIM records and more recently DMARC records and ensuring I have quality SSL setup on my web server and testing using https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ and ensuring I have quality headers too and test using https://securityheaders.com/. Now that Route 53 supports DNSSEC (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4033) I figured it was about time I enabled it. You can find some information about DNSSEC and enabling on your domain by following the AWS blog post: https://aws. Read more

There are a few tricks I’ve learnt recently that I thought I would share with you, as I’ve found them really useful. Constructs Constructs are objects that can contain a set of other objects to define a standard set of components. You can use constructs inside of constructs or you can user lower level Cfn primitives. You can find the AWS Documentation here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/latest/guide/constructs.html https://cdkworkshop.com/30-python/40-hit-counter.html To get started you inherit the Construct class, creating your new class. Read more