<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Green Reed Technology - Technology without boundaries</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/</link><description>Recent content on Green Reed Technology - Technology without boundaries</description><generator>Hugo</generator><language>en-us</language><lastBuildDate>Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://www.greenreedtech.com/index.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/><item><title>The Need for Workload Identity in the Private Cloud</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/the-need-for-workload-identity-in-the-private-cloud/</link><pubDate>Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/the-need-for-workload-identity-in-the-private-cloud/</guid><description>&lt;p>A growing consideration for cloud spending and the proliferation of AI have caused many organizations to evaluate their use of the public cloud. Many are looking at taking better advantage of their existing data centers or leveraging colocation facilities to enable the best of both worlds. Many will state that the cloud isn’t a location but an operating model. This means that companies have adopted operational patterns for managing workloads in the public cloud (location) that would like to leverage in their private cloud. I believe that workload identity is one of those patterns that many would like to take advantage of in their private cloud.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Integrating Gitness with Jenkins</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/integrating-gitness-with-jenkins/</link><pubDate>Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/integrating-gitness-with-jenkins/</guid><description>&lt;p>Jenkins is a popular open source CI server and many that are familiar with it often have a bit of a love/hate relationship. That being said, it is an incredibly powerful and flexible tool that is often used when there&amp;rsquo;s a need for a platform for building CI/CD pipelines to deploy code or infrastructure.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Getting Started with Gitness</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/getting-started-with-gitness/</link><pubDate>Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/getting-started-with-gitness/</guid><description>&lt;p>With everything being defined as code nowadays, there&amp;rsquo;s a need for a place to store and version that code. The popular selection would be a version control system (VCS) and more specifically, a git server. There&amp;rsquo;s a myriad of options that include hosted solutions such as Github, Azure DevOps, GitLab.com as well as self-hosted solutions such as Gogs, Gitea, and Gitlab. At this point I&amp;rsquo;ve used all of the aformentioned solutions but given that I do most of my tinkering in my homelab, I was looking for a self-hosted solution. A primary requirement was a simple and lightweight solution without all of the bells and whistles as I mainly needed it for just source control. I had heard about Harness introducing a VCS solution (&lt;a href="https://gitness.com/">gitness&lt;/a>) sometime ago but hadn&amp;rsquo;t gotten around to kicking the tires.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Looking Back at AI Field Day 4</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/looking-back-at-ai-field-day-4/</link><pubDate>Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/looking-back-at-ai-field-day-4/</guid><description>&lt;p>AI is dominating most tech and even non-tech conversations nowadays with no signs of it slowing down anytime soon. This was certainly evident based on the presentations at the &lt;a href="https://techfieldday.com/event/aifd4/">AI Field Day 4&lt;/a> event. The event provided an opportunity for various software and hardware vendors to present their AI related solutions to a group of delegates. The challenge that vendors often have is articulating a meaningful story without it coming off as though they are just sprinkling a little AI on an existing capability. The industry certainly saw a lot of this at the height of the Big Data, Machine Learning, and Blockchain hype cycles. I was interested in seeing if what was going to be presented was a &amp;ldquo;true&amp;rdquo; AI solution or primarily just an AI bolt-on.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Getting Started with Argo Workflows</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/getting-started-with-argo-workflows/</link><pubDate>Sun, 11 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/getting-started-with-argo-workflows/</guid><description>&lt;p>One of the technologies that I find the most enjoyable working with are orchestration solutions that are used to stitch together complex processes. Over my career I&amp;rsquo;ve worked with solutions like VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), StackStorm, as well as countless CI/CD platforms that are commonly used to orchestrate various processes. In this blog post we&amp;rsquo;ll take a look at a solution that I&amp;rsquo;ve been meaning to try out for quite some time in Argo Workflows. This is part of the broader umbrella of projects that includes ArgoCD, the popular GitOps solution for Kubernetes.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>VMware NSX+ Overview - Tech Field Day Extra</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vmware-nsx-overview-tech-field-day-extra/</link><pubDate>Wed, 06 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vmware-nsx-overview-tech-field-day-extra/</guid><description>&lt;p>VMware recently presented at the &lt;a href="https://techfieldday.com/appearance/vmware-presents-networking-and-security-at-tech-field-day-extra-at-vmware-explore-2023/">Tech Field Day Extra&lt;/a> event during VMware Explore 2023. The presentation covered VMware&amp;rsquo;s networking and security product updates.&lt;/p>
&lt;h2 id="cross-cloud-vision">Cross-Cloud Vision&lt;/h2>
&lt;p>VMware has been building out a cross-cloud solution that enables enterprise organizations to seamlessly deploy workloads to &amp;ldquo;any&amp;rdquo; cloud. This is being realized by building out operating environments in hyperscaler clouds such as AWS (VMC on AWS), Azure, GCP (Google Cloud VMware Engine), IBM Cloud (IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions), Oracle Cloud (Oracle Cloud VMware Solutions), and others. Each of these offerings is built using VMware&amp;rsquo;s SDDC solution which leverages vSphere for compute, vSAN for storage, and NSX for networking.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Detecting HashiCorp Vault Policy Changes</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/detecting-hashicorp-vault-policy-changes/</link><pubDate>Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/detecting-hashicorp-vault-policy-changes/</guid><description>&lt;p>Security of a HashiCorp Vault deployment is of paramount importance given the sensitive nature of the information contained within the platform. Policies within the platform are used to grant and deny access to the sensitive information stored in the platform.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>All operations in HashiCorp Vault are audited and can be shipped to a centralized logging server. In this scenario we want to utilize the audit log to find out when a policy is changed outside of the CI/CD process used to define all of our policies using code.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>HashiCorp Terraform Checksum Verification</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/hashicorp-terraform-checksum-verification/</link><pubDate>Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/hashicorp-terraform-checksum-verification/</guid><description>&lt;p>How do we verify that the Terraform binary we download is the same as the one HashiCorp produced?&lt;/p>
&lt;p>Ensuring the integrity of software is important to help prevent a malicious actor from tricking us into using a modified version of Terraform as well as ensuring the version we&amp;rsquo;re using isn&amp;rsquo;t corrupted. Checksums are used when there is a need to verify the integrity of software or data. The checksum process compares hashes of the software similar to how fingerprints are used for verification.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>HashiCorp Terraform Code Signing</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/hashicorp-terraform-code-signing/</link><pubDate>Mon, 16 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/hashicorp-terraform-code-signing/</guid><description>&lt;p>Signing software has become critically important given the recent supply chain attacks. How do we verify that the software we&amp;rsquo;re downloading is actually created by who believe created the software? In this case we want to ensure that the Terraform binary we&amp;rsquo;re downloading was created by HashiCorp. This helps prevent a scenario where a malicious actor tricks you into downloading a compromised version of Terraform.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Building a Lightweight Container Host for VMware vSphere</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/building-a-lightweight-container-host-for-vmware-vsphere/</link><pubDate>Fri, 22 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/building-a-lightweight-container-host-for-vmware-vsphere/</guid><description>&lt;p>Containerization and Kubernetes have dominated the IT conversation for the last handful of years. Containers enable rapid development, application portability and a myriad of other benefits. Containers rely on a host operating system in order to run and ideally it would be one that is extremely lightweight since the apps running in the containers are what we really care about.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Enabling Cloud Workload Identity for vSphere Virtual Machines</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/enabling-cloud-workload-identity-for-vsphere-virtual-machines/</link><pubDate>Thu, 21 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/enabling-cloud-workload-identity-for-vsphere-virtual-machines/</guid><description>&lt;p>One of the major benefits of using the public cloud is the integrated identity and access management (IAM). This simplifies the process of granting workloads access to other cloud services. Think about how an AWS EC2 instance is granted access to write objects to an S3 bucket. An IAM role is assigned to the instance which has a policy that grants the S3 access. This enables AWS CLI tools and application built upon the AWS SDK to access the bucket without explicitly providing credentials.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>HashiCorp Vault Unique AppRole Identity Logging</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/hashicorp-vault-unique-approle-identity-logging/</link><pubDate>Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/hashicorp-vault-unique-approle-identity-logging/</guid><description>&lt;p>HashiCorp Vault supports several authentication methods for human and non-human access. Several of the non-human authentication methods are tied to specific platforms or clouds such as AWS, Kubernetes, Azure, and others. For workloads that are running on non-supported platforms, the AppRole authentication method is typically recommended for authentication. The AppRole method uses a role as the core construct as the name implies. In order to authenticate a role ID and a secret ID are required.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>VMware vSphere VM iPXE Boot without DHCP</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vmware-vsphere-vm-ipxe-boot-without-dhcp/</link><pubDate>Fri, 27 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vmware-vsphere-vm-ipxe-boot-without-dhcp/</guid><description>&lt;p>Network booting operating systems isn’t a new concept and has been around for years. Bare metal deployments are typically where network booting is commonly used. Most network cards are equipped with a network boot rom that enables the server to boot from the network using the PXE protocol. The PXE protocol is an old protocol that offers limited functionality. iPXE (&lt;a href="https://ipxe.org/">https://ipxe.org/&lt;/a>) is an open source network boot firmware that extends PXE with additional functionality. Network booting comes with a number of challenges, primarily configuring and managing the associated infrastructure required (DHCP, TFTP, etc.). TFTP isn’t typically used in most IT environments and DHCP isn’t commonly available on networks or VLANs used for hosting servers.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>HashiCorp Vault vSphere Authentication with VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/hashicorp-vault-vsphere-authentication-with-vmware-event-broker-appliance-veba/</link><pubDate>Tue, 16 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/hashicorp-vault-vsphere-authentication-with-vmware-event-broker-appliance-veba/</guid><description>&lt;p>HashiCorp Vault supports a number of authentication methods including methods that utilize what HashiCorp refers to as a &amp;ldquo;trusted platform&amp;rdquo;. These include public clouds such as AWS, Azure and GCP along with platforms like Kubernetes. This method of authentication simplifies the introduction of the initial credential or secret that a workload must present to Vault by making use of information about itself that it already knows. The information that is provided to the instance or Kubernetes pod by the platform is metadata typically in the form of cryptographic data. This metadata is presented to HashiCorp Vault for authentication and verified by an API call to the underlying platform.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Creating a VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Golang Function</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/creating-a-vmware-event-broker-appliance-veba-golang-function/</link><pubDate>Fri, 12 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/creating-a-vmware-event-broker-appliance-veba-golang-function/</guid><description>&lt;p>The &lt;a href="https://vmweventbroker.io/">VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)&lt;/a> fling is a really interesting project that enables administrators to take advantage of event driven automation in a VMware vSphere environment. I&amp;rsquo;ve been meaning to kick the tires on using the appliance as I&amp;rsquo;ve thought a lot about vSphere event driven security and what that looks like from a technical implementation perspective. In this blog post we&amp;rsquo;ll take a look at how to quickly get started with developing a Golang function for the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) that executes when a virtual machine is powered on.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Martez Reed</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/author/martez-reed/</link><pubDate>Tue, 02 Feb 2021 10:20:19 +0600</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/author/martez-reed/</guid><description>&lt;p>Solutions architect specializing in automation &amp;amp; orchestration. Interested in configuration management, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (IaC), and orchestrating disparate pieces of automation.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Moving to Morpheus Data</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/moving-to-morpheus-data/</link><pubDate>Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/moving-to-morpheus-data/</guid><description>&lt;p>I have made the decision to become the director of technical marketing at &lt;a href="https://morpheusdata.com/">Morpheus Data&lt;/a> and I start that new position today. Morpheus Data is a company that I became aware of during &lt;a href="https://techfieldday.com/event/cfd3/">Cloud Field Day 3 (CFD3)&lt;/a> while serving as a delegate for the event. Cloud Field Day is one of several events hosted by &lt;a href="https://gestaltit.com/">Gestalt IT&lt;/a> in which several vendors present one at a time to a group of IT professionals that ask questions and provide feedback about the presentations. I was intrigued by what was covered during the &lt;a href="https://techfieldday.com/appearance/morpheus-data-presents-at-cloud-field-day-3/">presentation&lt;/a> as it is a product that is right in my technical wheelhouse.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Deployment Pipeline Chaos Engineering with StackStorm and ChaosToolkit</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/deployment-pipeline-chaos-engineering-with-stackstorm-and-chaostoolkit/</link><pubDate>Wed, 24 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/deployment-pipeline-chaos-engineering-with-stackstorm-and-chaostoolkit/</guid><description>&lt;p>Chaos Engineering is the practice of experimenting or injecting faults into a system to test how the system responds to the failure (&lt;a href="https://principlesofchaos.org">https://principlesofchaos.org&lt;/a>). Chaos Engineering is still new for many organizations and can be a daunting practice to adopt at first but even baby steps into the practice can be immediately beneficial.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Identifying Active HashiCorp Vault Root Tokens</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/identifying-active-hashicorp-vault-root-tokens/</link><pubDate>Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/identifying-active-hashicorp-vault-root-tokens/</guid><description>&lt;p>Revoking the root token on a production HashiCorp Vault deployment is one of the recommended best practices for securing an instance of HashiCorp Vault. The actual process to revoke the root token is fairly straightforward by running the &lt;code>vault token revoke&lt;/code> command and providing the root token at the command line. In a previous blog post we looked at how to detect when a new root token has been generated. This might be necessary to perform certain operations that require root to carry out. One thing to be aware of is that multiple root tokens can be active at a single moment in time so there is no one root token but potentially many. With the potential for multiple root tokens we need a way to determine if there are any currently active root tokens on our Vault deployment.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Detecting HashiCorp Vault Root Token Generation</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/detecting-hashicorp-vault-root-token-generation/</link><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/detecting-hashicorp-vault-root-token-generation/</guid><description>&lt;p>HashiCorp Vault generates a default root token during installation and best practice dictates that the token should be revoked once the deployment has been setup. There are certain critical operations that can only be carried out by a root token and requires that a new root token be generated. Given the immense power that the root token garners it would be ideal to identify when a root token is generated. In this example we&amp;rsquo;ll utilize the Vault audit log to determine when the process to generate a new root token is started and when it is successfully completed. Splunk will be used as our centralized logging server in this example.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Detecting HashiCorp Vault Root Login</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/detecting-hashicorp-vault-root-login/</link><pubDate>Sun, 09 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/detecting-hashicorp-vault-root-login/</guid><description>&lt;p>Security of a HashiCorp Vault deployment is of paramount importance given the sensitive nature of the information contained within the platform. During the initial configuration process the root token is used to perform the setup and should be used to create less privileged named accounts. These accounts should be used for day to day administration of the Vault deployment and the root token should only be used in scenarios where it is absolutely necessary. The reason for this is the all-powerful privileges that the root token wields on the platform. Based upon this information it is critical to know whenever the root token is used to log into the Vault deployment and that&amp;rsquo;s what will be covered in this blog post.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Puppet Bolt Vault Inventory Plugin</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/puppet-bolt-vault-inventory-plugin/</link><pubDate>Tue, 26 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/puppet-bolt-vault-inventory-plugin/</guid><description>&lt;p>In this blog post we&amp;rsquo;ll look at the HashiCorp Vault plugin for Puppet Bolt that enables authentication credentials for Bolt to be retrieved from an instance of HashiCorp Vault. HashiCorp Vault is a secrets management platform that is commonly used to store secrets such as API keys, passwords and SSH private keys. This solution helps to avoid secret sprawl where passwords and credentials are widely distributed across an environment making it difficult to track where they are.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Puppet Bolt Terraform Inventory Plugin</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/puppet-bolt-terraform-inventory-plugin/</link><pubDate>Sun, 06 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/puppet-bolt-terraform-inventory-plugin/</guid><description>&lt;p>HashiCorp Terraform is a popular Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that is used for provisioning virtual machines or cloud instances along with other resources. Once a virtual machine or cloud instance is provisioned typically it still needs to be configured which includes security baselines, application dependency configuration and even application deployment. The tasks are generally accomplished with a Configuration Management (CM) tool such as Puppet or Puppet Bolt.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>HashiCorp Packer Puppet Bolt Provisioner</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/hashicorp-packer-puppet-bolt-provisioner/</link><pubDate>Wed, 14 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/hashicorp-packer-puppet-bolt-provisioner/</guid><description>&lt;p>Treating workloads as &amp;ldquo;cattle&amp;rdquo; or immutable is a popular management paradigm for stateless workloads and is especially prevalent for such workloads that are hosted in a public cloud. The concept is based upon the notion that servers are pre-baked with all of the software that is needed for the application and any stateful data is pushed to an external persistent storage mechanism such as an object storage or a message queue. There&amp;rsquo;s a number of methods for accomplishing the pre-baking that includes the configuration and installation of software on the templates that will be used for immutable servers.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Advanced VMware vSphere Template Orchestration</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/advanced-vmware-vsphere-template-orchestration/</link><pubDate>Tue, 06 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/advanced-vmware-vsphere-template-orchestration/</guid><description>&lt;p>Template management is a critical facet of infrastructure management and traditionally one of the more challenging operations there is. The advent of tools like HashiCorp Packer have provided administrators with the ability declaratively automate the template creation process.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>Automation is great but in most organizations a single piece of automation is part of a larger process that includes tickets and potentially other hand offs.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Terraform Puppet Provisioner</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/terraform-puppet-provisioner/</link><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/terraform-puppet-provisioner/</guid><description>&lt;p>HashiCorp Terraform 0.12.2 added official support for a Puppet provisioner. One caveat is that the provisioner is only available in 0.12.x of Terraform. The provisioner provides a number of features such as adding data to the CSR for trusted facts, selecting between open source and enterprise agent versions along with autosigning the CSR.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>The Next Chapter at Puppet</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/the-next-chapter-at-puppet/</link><pubDate>Wed, 26 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/the-next-chapter-at-puppet/</guid><description>&lt;p>I&amp;rsquo;m now in my second week at Puppet which is best known for its configuration management software that shares the same name as the company. I&amp;rsquo;m extremely excited about this new chapter in my professional life and this blog post covers some of the reasons why. Hopefully this will provide anyone reading this with helpful information as they come to an inflection point in their career. I decided to use a number of &amp;ldquo;P&amp;rdquo; words to describe what this transition is for me.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>HashiCorp Vault Policy Metrics</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/hashicorp-vault-policy-metrics/</link><pubDate>Tue, 04 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/hashicorp-vault-policy-metrics/</guid><description>&lt;p>I gave a talk for HashiCorp&amp;rsquo;s HashiDays event earlier this year that centered around operational intelligence for HashiCorp Vault. The focus was on harnessing data and turning it into actionable insight to help drive informed decisions. One common insight that&amp;rsquo;s often required but not natively available for various reasons is a mechanism to identify what identities a policy is assigned to within Vault.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Search Result</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/search/</link><pubDate>Mon, 24 Sep 2018 11:07:10 +0600</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/search/</guid><description/></item><item><title>Vault Hardening Compliance using Chef InSpec</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vault-hardening-compliance-using-chef-inspec/</link><pubDate>Tue, 07 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vault-hardening-compliance-using-chef-inspec/</guid><description>&lt;p>HashiCorp Vault is quickly becoming the defacto secrets management platform used in environments that rely on DevOps concepts for application delivery. Vault is incredibly easy and simple to get started with but takes a bit of thought and planning to operationalize it.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>One of the challenges is ensuring that the installation of your security platform is secure. Chef InSpec is a compliance as code tool that allows us to create profiles that outline a desired security posture. In this post we&amp;rsquo;re looking at an example InSpec profile for Vault that mimics some of the common controls found in industry standards such as CIS benchmarks and DISA STIGs.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>NetApp: Highly Performant Storage for Cloud Native Apps</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/netapp-highly-performant-storage-for-cloud-native-apps/</link><pubDate>Tue, 01 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/netapp-highly-performant-storage-for-cloud-native-apps/</guid><description>&lt;p>NetApp was one of the &lt;strong>&amp;ldquo;legacy&amp;rdquo;&lt;/strong> companies that presented a number of compelling solutions at &lt;a href="http://techfieldday.com/event/cfd3/">Cloud Field Day #3&lt;/a>. The challenge for many similar companies is how do you continue to stay relevant given the pace at which technology moves.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>Kubernetes is the defacto container orchestration platform created by Google that is one of the hottest technologies within the IT industry at this time. One of the still developing areas with containers is the management of stateful applications which for many is an anti-pattern for containers which they feel should be stateless. The challenge with stateful applications running in containers is that there must be some sort of persistent storage to allow the state to survive the destruction of the container. This is where a company like NetApp comes into the picture.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Veritas: The Untold Story of A Cloud Company</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/veritas-the-untold-story-of-a-cloud-company/</link><pubDate>Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/veritas-the-untold-story-of-a-cloud-company/</guid><description>&lt;p>Earlier this month I had the privilege of being a delegate for Cloud Field Day 3 (&lt;a href="http://techfieldday.com/event/cfd3/">http://techfieldday.com/event/cfd3/&lt;/a>) which is a tech event put together by &lt;a href="http://gestaltit.com/">GestaltIT&lt;/a> where tech companies present to a group of IT professionals.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>One of the most intriguing presentations of the event was the presentation given by &lt;a href="https://www.veritas.com/">Veritas&lt;/a>. The CFD3 presentation was a mixed bag of good and not so good. One of the key takeaways for me was that sometimes the things you forget to highlight are some of the most intriguing to people. This post covers a number of Veritas products that weren&amp;rsquo;t covered during the presentations that really make the case for Veritas as a cloud company.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Vault Audit Logging</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vault-audit-logging/</link><pubDate>Thu, 01 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vault-audit-logging/</guid><description>&lt;p>Vault (&lt;a href="https://www.vaultproject.io/">https://www.vaultproject.io/&lt;/a>) is a secrets management tool created by HashiCorp that is extremely popular. Given the sensitive nature of the data being stored by a Vault server it is critical that auditing be configured appropriately to provide a record of who accessed sensitive data and when it was accessed. In this blog post we&amp;rsquo;ll walk through configuring a Vault server for auditing and dump the log entries to an AWS S3 bucket for centralized storage.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Terraform AWS S3 State Management Least Privilege</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/terraform-aws-s3-state-management-least-privilege/</link><pubDate>Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/terraform-aws-s3-state-management-least-privilege/</guid><description>&lt;p>A very popular Terraform state management configuration is to utilize AWS S3 for state management and AWS DynamoDB for state locking. The problem is that there does not appear to be a publicly available document that details the minimum privileges required by an AWS user or role to leverage AWS S3 and DynamoDB for Terraform state management.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>vSphere Immutable Infrastructure with Terraform</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vsphere-immutable-infrastructure-with-terraform/</link><pubDate>Fri, 13 Oct 2017 16:56:47 +0600</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vsphere-immutable-infrastructure-with-terraform/</guid><description>&lt;h2 id="what-is-immutable-infrastructure">What is immutable infrastructure?&lt;/h2>
&lt;p>Immutable infrastructure is the concept of utilizing an infrastructure component in an ephemeral manner. This means that the component can be destroyed and recreated at will without major impact.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>&lt;strong>Advantages&lt;/strong>&lt;/p>
&lt;ul>
&lt;li>Troublesome instances can easily be destroyed and recreated.&lt;/li>
&lt;li>System patching processes are replaced by just provisioning instances from a new template.&lt;/li>
&lt;/ul>
&lt;p>&lt;strong>Terraform&lt;/strong>&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) and PostgreSQL Database SSL</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vrealize-orchestrator-vro-and-postgresql-database-ssl/</link><pubDate>Fri, 30 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vrealize-orchestrator-vro-and-postgresql-database-ssl/</guid><description>&lt;p>In a previous post we walked through configuring a PostgreSQL database server as the external database for our vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) cluster. In this post we&amp;rsquo;ll cover adding SSL support to encrypt the traffic between our vReazlie Orchestrator cluster and our PostgreSQL database server.&lt;/p>
&lt;h2 id="postgresql-ssl-configuration">PostgreSQL SSL Configuration&lt;/h2>
&lt;h4 id="generate-csr">Generate CSR&lt;/h4>
&lt;p>The first thing we need to do is get our SSL certificate for the database server. In this case we&amp;rsquo;re going to use openssl to generate our certificate request and ultimately we&amp;rsquo;ll use openssl self-sign the certificate.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) Cluster with a PostgreSQL Database</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vrealize-orchestrator-vro-cluster-with-a-postgresql-database/</link><pubDate>Mon, 26 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vrealize-orchestrator-vro-cluster-with-a-postgresql-database/</guid><description>&lt;p>In this post we&amp;rsquo;re going to build out a two node vRealize Orchestrator cluster with a PostgreSQL database. VMware is deprecating support for Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases as the vRO external database in favor of PostgreSQL.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>&lt;a href="https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Orchestrator/7.3/rn/vrealize-orchestrator-73-release-notes.html">https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Orchestrator/7.3/rn/vrealize-orchestrator-73-release-notes.html&lt;/a>&lt;/p>
&lt;h2 id="postgresql-database-installation-and-configuration">PostgreSQL database installation and configuration&lt;/h2>
&lt;p>The first thing we need to do is install and configure PostgreSQL on a linux server. The following steps will how to install and configure PostgreSQL 9.6.3 on a CentOS 7 machine.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>vRA 7.2 dynamic property list from REST API</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vra-7.2-dynamic-property-list-from-rest-api/</link><pubDate>Fri, 26 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vra-7.2-dynamic-property-list-from-rest-api/</guid><description>&lt;p>In this post we&amp;rsquo;re going to walk through how to dynamically populate a vRA request field using values retrieved from a REST API using vRO.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>A common scenario when working with any software is wanting to test against multiple versions of the software.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>In this example we&amp;rsquo;re going to dynamically fetch the software version of StackStorm (&lt;a href="https://stackstorm.com/">https://stackstorm.com/&lt;/a>) from github so that we can select which version to install from the vRA request form.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>vRealize Automation 7.2 hardening compliance with vRO and Splunk</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vrealize-automation-7.2-hardening-compliance-with-vro-and-splunk/</link><pubDate>Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vrealize-automation-7.2-hardening-compliance-with-vro-and-splunk/</guid><description>&lt;p>In this post we&amp;rsquo;ll walk through how we can utilize vRealize Orchestrator and Splunk to determine how compliant our vRA appliance is with the &lt;a href="https://pubs.vmware.com/vrealize-automation-72/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vrealize-automation-72-hardening.pdf">vRealize Automation 7.2 hardening guide&lt;/a>.&lt;/p>
&lt;h4 id="vra-72-hardening-compliance-script">vRA 7.2 hardening compliance script&lt;/h4>
&lt;p>The first task is utilizing a script to check the settings specified in the hardening guide. In our case we&amp;rsquo;re going to generate JSON output from the script in order to easily ingest the data into Splunk. We&amp;rsquo;re utilizing bash to avoid any dependencies upon other packages that aren&amp;rsquo;t part of the default appliance install. The script below has been truncated for brevity and can be found in the github repo (&lt;a href="https://github.com/martezr/vra72-hardening-automation">https://github.com/martezr/vra72-hardening-automation&lt;/a>).&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>vRO - Building a dynamic drop-down for vSphere tags</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vro-building-a-dynamic-drop-down-for-vsphere-tags/</link><pubDate>Fri, 07 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vro-building-a-dynamic-drop-down-for-vsphere-tags/</guid><description>&lt;p>A recent blog post by Rob Nelson about using vRO to provision VMs with vSphere tags (&lt;a href="https://rnelson0.com/2017/04/06/vrealize-orchestrator-workflows-for-puppet-enterprise/">https://rnelson0.com/2017/04/06/vrealize-orchestrator-workflows-for-puppet-enterprise/&lt;/a>) got me thinking about how to present a dynamic list of vSphere tags in vRO. So in this post we&amp;rsquo;ll walk through how to create a dynamic drop-down list of vSphere tags in vRO.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>vRA7 Chatops with StackStorm</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vra7-chatops-with-stackstorm/</link><pubDate>Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vra7-chatops-with-stackstorm/</guid><description>&lt;p>ChatOps is a pretty cool and still emerging technology that allows users to initiate actions on external systems from within a messaging platform such as slack. There are already bots available from vendors such as opvizor (&lt;a href="http://www.opvizor.com/opbot/">http://www.opvizor.com/opbot/&lt;/a>) that provide this functionality in a productized solution. In the case of opvizor, their bot interacts with VMware vSphere.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Puppet Policy Based Autosigning with vRA7</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/puppet-policy-based-autosigning-with-vra7/</link><pubDate>Thu, 09 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/puppet-policy-based-autosigning-with-vra7/</guid><description>&lt;h3 id="what-is-policy-based-autosigning">What is Policy Based Autosigning&lt;/h3>
&lt;p>A critical aspect of any Puppet deployment is determining how we want to allow nodes to get their certificate signed by the Puppet master. Before we delve into policy based autosigning we&amp;rsquo;ll discuss the other three methods for managing certificate signing.&lt;/p>
&lt;ul>
&lt;li>
&lt;p>&lt;strong>Manual&lt;/strong>&lt;/p>
&lt;ul>
&lt;li>Manually signing certs breaks automated deployment processes.&lt;/li>
&lt;/ul>
&lt;/li>
&lt;li>
&lt;p>&lt;strong>Naive&lt;/strong>&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>vSphere Alarms with Slack and StackStorm</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vsphere-alarms-with-slack-and-stackstorm/</link><pubDate>Fri, 03 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/vsphere-alarms-with-slack-and-stackstorm/</guid><description>&lt;p>Being notified of when something happens in your environment has always been important and has evolved over time from basic emails to IM messages via tools like Slack.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>This post will cover posting alarm information to Slack via StackStorm. In addition post alarm information to Slack we can take autoremediation actions in response to alarms which we&amp;rsquo;ll cover in later posts.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Jenkins Certified Engineer: Folders</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/jenkins-certified-engineer-folders/</link><pubDate>Thu, 14 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/jenkins-certified-engineer-folders/</guid><description>&lt;p>This post covers the section listed below on the Certified Jenkins Engineer (CJE) exam.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>Section #3: Building Continuous Delivery (CD) Pipelines&lt;/p>
&lt;p>Folders&lt;/p>
&lt;ul>
&lt;li>How to control access to items in Jenkins with folders&lt;/li>
&lt;li>Referencing jobs in folders&lt;/li>
&lt;/ul>
&lt;h4 id="what-are-folders">What are folders?&lt;/h4>
&lt;p>Jenkins provides the ability to organize jobs into a hierarchical manner with the &lt;a href="https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/CloudBees+Folders+Plugin">CloudBees Folders Plugin&lt;/a>. This allows us to manage the jobs much like we would files on a file system. Folders can also be used to manage permissions on a per folder basis to ease security administration.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Useful Docker Commands</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/useful-docker-commands/</link><pubDate>Sun, 12 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/useful-docker-commands/</guid><description>&lt;p>Docker (&lt;a href="https://www.docker.com/">https://www.docker.com/&lt;/a>) is arguably the most popular container platform and this post covers a number of useful Docker commands from basic commands about viewing system information to viewing logs of docker containers. Additional commands can be found at the Docker docs website (&lt;a href="https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/cli/">https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/cli/&lt;/a>) or via the command line help.&lt;/p>
&lt;h4 id="docker-version">Docker Version&lt;/h4>
&lt;p>View the version of docker installed on the system. Both the client and server version are listed.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Jenkins Certified Engineer: Fingerprints</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/jenkins-certified-engineer-fingerprints/</link><pubDate>Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/jenkins-certified-engineer-fingerprints/</guid><description>&lt;p>This post covers the section listed below on the Certified Jenkins Engineer (CJE) exam.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>&lt;strong>Section #1: Key CI/CD/Jenkins Concepts&lt;/strong>&lt;/p>
&lt;p>&lt;strong>Fingerprints&lt;/strong>&lt;/p>
&lt;ul>
&lt;li>&lt;strong>What are fingerprints?&lt;/strong>&lt;/li>
&lt;li>&lt;strong>How do fingerprints work?&lt;/strong>&lt;/li>
&lt;/ul>
&lt;h4 id="what-are-fingerprints">What are fingerprints?&lt;/h4>
&lt;p>Jenkins utilizes fingerprints for tracking a specific instance of a file. This is critically important when attempting to determine which particular version of a file was used during a build. The fingerprint of a file is simply a MD5 checksum that can be used for comparing files.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Jenkins Job Builder</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/jenkins-job-builder/</link><pubDate>Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/jenkins-job-builder/</guid><description>&lt;p>Recently a co-worker of mine (Thanks Ken Erwin) introduced me to Jenkins Job Builder (&lt;a href="http://docs.openstack.org/infra/jenkins-job-builder/">http://docs.openstack.org/infra/jenkins-job-builder/&lt;/a>) which is a project created by the OpenStack infrastructure team that aims to automate the creation of Jenkins Jobs. The software is written in python and utilizes either yaml or json files as the framework for creating Jenkins jobs. A list of some of the primary features is provided below.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Jenkins Active Directory</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/jenkins-active-directory/</link><pubDate>Fri, 20 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/jenkins-active-directory/</guid><description>&lt;p>This post covers integrating Jenkins CI server with Microsoft Active Directory to provide centralized authentication.&lt;/p>
&lt;h3 id="step-1---install-he-active-directory-plugin">Step #1 - Install he Active Directory plugin&lt;/h3>
&lt;p>&lt;strong>Click &amp;ldquo;Manage Jenkins&amp;rdquo; from the sidebar&lt;/strong>&lt;/p>
&lt;p>&lt;img src="https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/greenreedtech.com/jce_folders/Jenkins_AD_1.png" alt="">&lt;/p>
&lt;p>&lt;strong>Click &amp;ldquo;Manage Plugins&amp;rdquo; to install the Active Directory plugin&lt;/strong>&lt;/p>
&lt;p>&lt;img src="https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/greenreedtech.com/jce_folders/Jenkins_AD_2.png" alt="">&lt;/p>
&lt;p>&lt;strong>Click on the &amp;ldquo;Available&amp;rdquo; tab, enter &amp;ldquo;Active Directory&amp;rdquo; in the &amp;ldquo;Filter:&amp;rdquo; search box, click the checkbox next to &amp;ldquo;Active Directory plugin&amp;rdquo; and finally click &amp;ldquo;Download now and install after restart&amp;rdquo;&lt;/strong>&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Puppet Hiera HTTP Using CouchDB</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/puppet-hiera-http-using-couchdb/</link><pubDate>Thu, 19 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/puppet-hiera-http-using-couchdb/</guid><description>&lt;p>Puppet supports various hiera backends to pull in external data from various sources. This post will cover integrating open source puppet with a couchdb database using the hiera-http backend.&lt;/p>
&lt;h2 id="couchdb-setup-and-configuration">CouchDB Setup and Configuration&lt;/h2>
&lt;p>The following steps will cover the setup and configuration of the CouchDB database server that will be used as the data store. The following steps assume that docker has been installed&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>About</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/about/</link><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/about/</guid><description>&lt;p>I’m currently the Director of Technical Marketing for Morpheus Data with a focus on the creation of technical content for the Morpheus platform.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>My background is in system administration with a current focus on all things automation and orchestration. The majority of my career has been spent in client facing consulting and helping organizations with DevOps initiatives.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Elements</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/elements/</link><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/elements/</guid><description>&lt;h4 id="heading-example">Heading example&lt;/h4>
&lt;p>Here is example of hedings. You can use this heading by following markdownify rules. For example: use &lt;code>#&lt;/code> for heading 1 and use &lt;code>######&lt;/code> for heading 6.&lt;/p>
&lt;h1 id="heading-1">Heading 1&lt;/h1>
&lt;h2 id="heading-2">Heading 2&lt;/h2>
&lt;h3 id="heading-3">Heading 3&lt;/h3>
&lt;h4 id="heading-4">Heading 4&lt;/h4>
&lt;h5 id="heading-5">Heading 5&lt;/h5>
&lt;h6 id="heading-6">Heading 6&lt;/h6>
&lt;hr>
&lt;h5 id="emphasis">Emphasis&lt;/h5>
&lt;p>Emphasis, aka italics, with &lt;em>asterisks&lt;/em> or &lt;em>underscores&lt;/em>.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>Strong emphasis, aka bold, with &lt;strong>asterisks&lt;/strong> or &lt;strong>underscores&lt;/strong>.&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>No Search Found</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/404/</link><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/404/</guid><description/></item><item><title>Privacy</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/privacy/</link><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/privacy/</guid><description>&lt;h4 id="responsibility-of-contributors">Responsibility of Contributors&lt;/h4>
&lt;p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Purus, donec nunc eros, ullamcorper id feugiat quisque aliquam sagittis. Sem turpis sed viverra massa gravida pharetra. Non dui dolor potenti eu dignissim fusce. Ultrices amet, in curabitur a arcu a lectus morbi id. Iaculis erat sagittis in tortor cursus. Molestie urna eu tortor, erat scelerisque eget. Nunc hendrerit sed interdum lacus. Lorem quis viverra sed&lt;/p></description></item><item><title>Terms And Conditions</title><link>https://www.greenreedtech.com/terms-conditions/</link><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.greenreedtech.com/terms-conditions/</guid><description>&lt;h4 id="responsibility-of-contributors">Responsibility of Contributors&lt;/h4>
&lt;p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Purus, donec nunc eros, ullamcorper id feugiat quisque aliquam sagittis. Sem turpis sed viverra massa gravida pharetra. Non dui dolor potenti eu dignissim fusce. Ultrices amet, in curabitur a arcu a lectus morbi id. Iaculis erat sagittis in tortor cursus. Molestie urna eu tortor, erat scelerisque eget. Nunc hendrerit sed interdum lacus. Lorem quis viverra sed&lt;/p></description></item></channel></rss>