Catching Up: Cloud Stuff, Security Bugs, and Getting Back Into Projects

Man, it’s been a busy couple of months, so I’m just gonna ramble about a few things at once here.

Work-wise, our private cloud project has actually been moving pretty fast. We’re using Apache OpenStack to give our devs an in-house cloud setup. Because we’ve got multiple BUs and need everything to stay on-prem (hello, Canadian data sovereignty), OpenStack + HPE Synergy + FortiGate + NETAPP has basically become our little Frankenstack. All of it tied together with Terraform… well, now Terragrunt. And if you don’t know what Terragrunt is and you have multiple environments? You probably should. It keeps everything DRY—Don’t Repeat Yourself—which is great because I love duplicating code (sarcasm, obviously).

One of the nice bonuses is environment-level separation. Our network team has FortiGate creds, we don’t. With a single Terraform setup, you’d need creds for everything. With Terragrunt, you only touch the environment you’re actually working on, and it handles the rest. Way cleaner.

Personal project-wise? Honestly, not much lately. I kinda took a break. Hopefully writing this gets me back in the groove.

The React Shell bug that dropped recently actually affected this blog (it’s patched now, don’t try it 😠). That whole thing got me thinking more about security and how we can use AI to spot this stuff. I might start poking at some Blue Team-style research at work—maybe automated AI-assisted pentesting so we can catch known issues early. Still noodling on that idea.

The other thing that’s been grabbing my brain is Chaos Engineering. Stuff like Chaos Monkey tearing through your environment, killing random services just to make sure you actually built things to be highly available. The dream is for the ops team to never get woken up at 2 AM. Let the system heal itself, check it in the morning, and deal with whatever’s left.

I also want to add voice dictation directly into the blog because right now I’m just dictating into VS Code and then cleaning it up with AI tools.

There’s honestly a lot more I could talk about—like Notebook LLM and how insanely useful it’s been for my D&D campaigns—but that’s definitely a whole separate post.

Anyway, here’s hoping this is the start of me getting back into things. Later days.