RUN TCP/IP | Morgan Lucas is Tech Blogging

This blog post is located over here; Managing Scalable Azure Infrastructure

I nfracost integrates with Infrastructure as Code technologies to check the costs of the infrastructure you're creating or changing, in multiple currencies, multiple cloud platforms, and can integrate with multiple repos and pull requests.  Hooray!   The single-sentence description is 'Shift FinOps Left". Not sure what that means, but let's look at the software itself. The tag policies feature seems similar to the regulations one can set up in Trivy, like I've done over here , to make Terraform code adhere to certain rules. I installed it via chocolatey on Windows 11, using it to check my Azure resources. Don't forget to get the API key as well, it is a lot easier to set up than you think, and used the CLI in the program; here's that documentation (Option 1) . It does not check the free tiers of Azure and uses On-Demand prices by default. This is the output for infracost breakdown ;  You'll notice that it does round down; My cost is 15.41$, and the t...

Also posted here .   Remember that second hand Chromebook I bought for a client years ago? They upgraded and gave it back, so let's put Linux or Ubuntu on it. I'm going to see if I can put a distro in there and switch between Chrome OS and Linux. It took longer to find the correct package to install than anything else. Out of the proverbial Chrome Development Mode box, it doesn't recognize apt, apt-get, or yum.  Nor does it recognize any attempts to install them. The Chromebook's Linux option installs Penguin, the default Linux Container on Chrome OS. It struggled to start, so I deleted the Linux container and tried again with success. Most instructions say to enable your Chromebook’s Developer Mode then open a certain terminal; Instead, I found you enable Linux Penguin through Chrome OS (Easy, check your settings) and use that containerized version. When you do this, Crostini is already installed, which is a more secure form of Crouton. Crouton is outdated. C...

 A very brief look. The text says; Drag and drop any CloudFormation resource on a visual canvas Connect and configure enhanced components to automatically build IaC for an application architecture Seamlessly transition between authoring workflows visually with Step Functions Workflow Studio and defining resources with Infrastructure Composer Integrate your browser with your project through “local sync” or use Composer in the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code In 2019 there was a similar tool to build infrastructure that would be converted to code. Nice to know they bought it back. When you enter the Composer, it's a blank space with a background reminiscent to the screen for Cloud Formation. Infrastructure Objects are to the left in a drawer;  I've selected a bucket that I can rename. I went to connect a bucket to a Dynamo DB Table, and it's not available yet. It also lost a bucket somewhere in the ether of the GUI. Ah well. I couldn't find the EC2 instance in the...

     Can I make an Alexa Skill That Searches Bing?   I use Bing as my search engine, and would love it if I could ask Alexa and have that trail of searches attached to my account to look back upon.  Fun fact: When you ask Alexa a question, it's already using Bing. But it's not using my account. So let's see if I can walk through the idea.  Questions:  Alexa searches the internet when you ask it a query. What specifically does it search? It's own database of information? Is it like ChatGPT where the system is not directly connected to the internet but has all of the internet up until a certain point in the past?  Can I make an Alexa Skill that attaches to a dataset of information I host on AWS? The preliminary search reveals Knowledge Skills , which seems to be "give us information and when people ask about it, we can just tell them within the scope of our knowledge." Would I need AWS to make an Alexa Skill at all? Most likely; When you cre...

 I now have the URL runtcpip.com pointed toward my Google Sites site. This change is reflected on the navigation as 'Projects (Cloud)'. Why? Despite both Blogger and Google Sites being owned by Alphabet/Google, Sites is actually maintained. Google Sites has better security posture and features. It looks more modern, and has multiple pages. I'm 89% sure the SEO is already built in and works better. I didn't have to finangle with attaching Analytics  This blog isn't going anywhere! It will be used as more general technology musings...which it kind of already was. One day I will have another URL to point here, but for now, you can reach it via https://runtcpip.blogspot.com/

 Out of all the online tools I've tried and tested, I can't believe I haven't talked about this one, one I've used over 4 years at this point and continues to add features that help. It's how I found many emails to politely and persistently ask about my application while sending relevant links to this blog but there's a lot more down there too! I uploaded the .CSV of emails to recruiters I use to send personalized, yet still batch, emails through Google Sheets to check for validity and acceptance rates.  It did work, but I retracted everyone's information.   I had used the tool to check a few individual addresses and it did find one that was no longer operational; Suppose the person moved onto a new role. I also converted it to a Campaign to send mass emails - which does have a neat thing to check how spammy one's email may be, though it doesn't give hints on how to better coerce click through and action for recipients.  It seems to correlate doing...