It’s tough to find an organization that is not leveraging a public cloud platform. With all the SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS providers out there, chances are you’ve used cloud services in some manner. As public cloud utilization continues to ramp up in many industries (e.g., insurance, financial, business), organizations are encountering a new challenge: how to correctly consume these new platforms and technologies. It’s a workforce challenge more so than it is a technical challenge. This article was originally published in the State Farm Engineering Blog. Link to the original blog can be found here. It’s a workforce challenge because, at the end of the day, it comes down to technical education and experience. Organizations with a workforce skilled in cloud technologies will have a smoother cloud consumption experience compared to one lacking a workforce with cloud experience. Every organization is competing for talent - we all want that DevSecOps engineer and/or Cloud Architect that can do it all (CI/CD, Programming, Security, Architecting, Data, Test, etc.

Chances are most of us have stumbled into someone’s digital portfolio. This can range from book authors to IT professionals, it’s pretty universal as everyone can benefit from it. Is it needed, probably not but it does help quite a bit in showcasing your skills and who knows, perhaps it could be the difference between you getting an interview and/or a phone call. Let’s say you decided you want a digital portfolio, you’re probably wondering how to go about getting started? Does it cost money? Is it affordable? Do I have to be a programmer? Do I need to maintain a server? What if I told you can do it all for free, with no programming skills, and virtually zero maintenance. All you need is some patience, a little bit of guidance and some spare time. Sounds pretty neat right? Well if that interest you let’s dive into what it takes to make a digital portfolio.

HahsiCorp has added two new tools in Terraform. As of Terraform v.12.20 there are two new functions available for consumers try() and can() . Along with these two functions there is an experimental feature available, variable_validation . In this article we’re going to look into how these new functions are used and how they works. This article was originally published on Medium. Link to the Medium article can be found here. All code snippets can be found at https://github.com/karl-cardenas-coding/terraform-functions Note: Variable validation is an experimental feature as of v12.20 use with caution as it is not recommended for production usage at this time. The can and try()function can only catch and handle dynamic errors resulting from access to data that isn’t known until runtime. It will not catch >errors relating to expressions that can be proven to be invalid for any input, such as a malformed resource reference. Can() The can() function attempts to execute the following code provided inside of it and returns a boolean value.

Photo by Jukan Tateisi on Unsplash There is no easy button! We have all been there, feeling stuck, unsure of how to move to the next level. This can apply to your current job role, or career as a whole. And unfortunately, this feeling of being trapped is also not a one-time incident, sometimes we can feel this way several times throughout our careers. You already know this but sometimes it helps to hear it again. To get to the next step, there is no easy button! This article was originally published on LinkedIn. Link to the article can be found here. In the past year I’ve been asked by fellow IT professionals for guidance on advancing in the IT field. Everyone’s situation is different but they all share common pain points. In an effort to help others beyond my immediate reach, I decided to write down the advice I provide to those that seek my input.

Sentinel is HashiCorp’s framework for implementation of Policy as Code (PaC). It integrates with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and allows teams/organizations to be proactive from a compliance/risk standpoint. Sentinel allows for granular, logic-based policy decisions that reads information from external sources to derive a decision. In plain English, based on logic written (policies), Sentinel can act as a decision maker based on information provided. This is pretty handy when you want to prevent users from executing specific actions, or ensure that certain steps/actions are conducted. Example, an employee attempting to deploy a bad practice network rule that allows everyone in the internet inbound access! It’s important to call out that Sentinel is a dynamic programming language, with types and the ability to work with rule constructs based on boolean logic. This article was originally published on Medium. Link to the Medium article can be found here. First things first, implementation of Sentinel is only available to HashiCorp enterprise customers, hence a reason for why the only documentation available is from HashiCorp.

The explosion of public cloud platforms has made the accessibility and consumption of IT infrastructure an uncomplicated experience. The traditional IT infrastructure found in vast and expensive corporate data centers can now be consumed by anyone with an internet connection. As organizations/businesses start consuming public cloud platforms and its infrastructure you often hear the expression, infrastructure as code (IaC). This article was originally published on Medium. Link to the Medium article can be found here. If you have ever wondered, the what, the why, and the how, in regards to IaC then you have come to the right place. Static/Dynamic Infrastructure Before we dive into the nuts and bolts of IaC it helps to first understand how IT infrastructure works. Let’s start with static infrastructure, think server racks, mainframes, routers, switches, firewalls, and pretty much any equipment you expect to find in a traditional data center. In this static infrastructure environment, when you need more capacity you simply add more capacity though physical provisioning, either through horizontal and/or vertical scaling.