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Where Should I Start in Cybersecurity?" - A SOC and Cloud Security Path When I’m asked “where should I start in Cybersecurity,” I like to recommend beginning in a Security Operations Center (SOC). I’ve recently discovered Cyber NOW Education and have been impressed with what Tyler Wall has been cultivating. The platform offers an excellent starting point for those looking to break into the security field. I was particularly impressed with all the free resources available, which prompted me to support Cyber NOW Education by purchasing the Black Badge. This premium option unlocks everything on the site, including access to the Splunk Cyber Range. ...

Day 5 of The Cloud Boot Camp MultiCloud | DevOps | AI challenge has wrapped. The challnge wrapped up incorporating the BigQuery Real-Time Analytics from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Azure AI Language for Sentiment Analysis. These services allowes tracking of language used in the AI Agent to visualize sentiment data. Today’s steps: To start new front and backend code needed to be deployed Frontend was quick to deploy with the pipeline setup on Day 3 The backend needed to be deployed manually This is on the ToDo List after the Challenge Setup the BigQuery API in GPC Enable APIs and Services Created a Data Set in BigQuery Created a table named “cloudmart-orders” Schema: - id: STRING - items: JSON - userEmail: STRING - total: FLOAT - status: STRING - createdAt: TIMESTAMP Configured Lambda function Created more DynamoDB tables in AWS using Terraform updated current Terraform file to keep state and everything together Created Azure Text Analytics In Azure console created new resource for Text Aanlytics Added the Azure Endpoint and API Key to the backend yaml configuration file and redeployed backend kubectl apply -f cloudmart-backend.yaml Overall a successful 5 day challenge. I had a lot of fun and I see doing a lot more of these in teh future. Thank You to everyone at The Cloud Bootcamp for putting together this challenge I had a lot of fun running through the “real-world” type scenario. ...

Well day 4 of the MultiCloud | DevOps | AI challenge was all about working with AI. The past 3 days have been setting up the “marketplace” to provide the foundation. First steps today were to utilize Terraform to create a Lambda function. Lambda is a serverless compute service to run code without provisioning a server. The first part of the updates to the main.tf file were to setup an lambda role, then a lambda policy to scan the DynamoDB tables. Since we are utilizing an existing Terraform with state we can deploy the lambda quickly. As always I like to make sure the synatx of the file is good by using the terraform validate command. Since we have a state file already in use, used on Day 1 for the DynamoDB tables, a quick terraform apply --auto-approve and the lambda funciton and the role are created. ...

Today I worked on TheCloudBootcamp’s MultiCloug | DevOps | AI 5 day challenge. I’m in to the 3rd days tasks to move the manual app build and deploy process to CI/CD. This employed using GitHub with webhooks to AWS CodePipelines to automatically build and deploy changes to EKS. This challenge was tough however working through the CodePipeline, CodeBuild and CodeDeploy projects which were fun to setup. Once everything was setup a commit to GitHub to the CloudMart repo triggered a WebHook to the pipeline to pull the repo build a new front end image container and then deployed it to an EKS cluster. ...

Day 2 of the challenge started off with a bang. Working with source code for the fictious comapny “CloudMart”, the goal for the day was to build a containers for the front and backend of the app and deploy on AWS EKS. Kubernetes is so much fun, thrilled to see the scenario use it. Since this was the first pass of getting everything working we will be staring out with manual builds to make sure everything works and we can mature the build process down the line. ...

Starting the week out with joing The Cloud Boootcamp MultiCloud | DevOps| AI challenge. Jean Rodrigues and team at “The Cloud Bootcamp” are hosting a week challenge to present a scenario for a fictiouscompany “CloudMart” that involves moving an application to mulitple clouds, using DevOps practices to automate deployments through pipelines and using AI Assistants to provide customer support and chat assistance in the app. This first day was utilized as an introduction to the architecture and setup the basics needed for AWS. There are some secuirty gaps in this fictuious setup that need some work but for a 5-day quick challenge there will be some areas to NOTE to improve security postuere. ...

Today I start something new in my journey. Today is the day I start capturing things I’m working on, learning or chasing down the rablit hole. Hopefully as I capture what I’m doing I can share pain points and/or inspire others. I’m goign to start this out on Hugo with the PaperMod theme and see where this leads me. This will allow me to write content in Markdown and easily make static pages. ...