David Whiteside

Guide for having fun (and winning) a Jam Session at re:Invent

AWS Jam Sessions are hands-on, gamified events designed to test your knowledge of AWS services, security, architecture, and operational best practices. Competing in a Jam requires a mix of AWS expertise, problem-solving skills, quick thinking, and teamwork. If you want to maximize your chances of winning, here’s a strategic guide to your next AWS Jam Session.

What to expect

AWS Jam Session at re:Invent

AWS Jam Session teams must solve under time constraints. Challenges range from security incident response and infrastructure automation to networking and AI/ML deployments. Teams are typically made up of four members.

Posted by David Whiteside on Thursday, December 12, 2024

Simple Tool to Create Throw-Away Python Virtual Environments

Managing Python dependencies in isolated environments is a common practice in software development. But what if you need a quick, temporary virtual environment that you can discard after use? Here’s a simple tool and workflow to create throw-away Python virtual environments.

The Problem

While Python’s built-in venv or tools like virtualenv are excellent for managing environments, they require setup and cleanup. For quick experiments or isolated dependency installations, this process can feel cumbersome.

Posted by David Whiteside on Saturday, December 7, 2024

Using a Smartcard (PIV or CAC) with Ansible

As part of the Ansible 2.12 release, pkcs11/smartcards are now supported by Ansible. Now you can use smartcards and other devices that support pkcs11 (Yubikey) to configure systems with Ansible.

Setup your middleware for pkcs11, below is how to install opensc on a Mac using homebrew.

$ brew install opensc

To use pkcs11 for authentication set the ANSIBLE_PKCS11_PROVIDER environment variable

$ export ANSIBLE_PKCS11_PROVIDER=/usr/local/lib/opensc-pkcs11.so
$ ansible-playbook -u USERNAME -b -k -K PLAYBOOK.yml --connection=ssh
SSH password: << Enter your PKCS11 Pin for your smartcard
SUDO password[defaults to SSH password]: << Enter your user account password for sudo

For more details see the feature PR.

Posted by David Whiteside on Wednesday, March 7, 2018

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Cloud Engineer · AWS & HPC & DevOps

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