Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology created by Amazon Web Services (AWS) which underpins their AWS Lambda Functions as a Service (FaaS) serverless product.

A short post discussing the installation of Nvidia Datacenter GPU Manager on Amazon Linux 2023. I recently had to figure this out using sketchy documentation, so I’m hoping this helps some folks out there doing similar head scratching.

Terraform is a flexible, cloud agnostic infrastructure as code (IaC) tool. As it constructs infrastructure resources, it builds a ledger used to track resources that have successfully been created as well as additional metadata (such as id.) Terraform stores this state in a binary formatted file with the extension .tfstate.

What is the Terraform S3 Backend

The Terraform state file described above by default is stored in the same directory as the Terraform infrastructure definition files you wrote. But with this state on your local computer it is vulnerable to being lost or overwritten, and it cannot be shared with or managed by other team members. Using a distributed storage mechanism to store this state file is straightforward with Terraform, and they provide many backend options. For AWS users, the Terraform S3 Backend allows storing this state file in AWS S3.

As we bring 2024 to a close, and after an invigorating week at AWS re:Invent, many will be writing their year in review summaries. I’ve decided to dedicate those column inches to the state of serverless sustainability today. The observant among us are quite aware of how the artificial intelligence (AI) craze has wormed it’s way into every product, industry and conversation over the past year. It’s been making headlines as shuttered power plants like Three Mile Island are reopened. And it’s on a collision course with the world’s climate change goals. (AWS also announced in October they signed agreements for 3 small modular nuclear reactor projects for their own data centers.)

There’s been a recent uptick in the number of S3 buckets that have become “hijacked” or “taken over”.

How can an attacker take over your S3 bucket? What can you do to prevent this on your buckets?

We’ll answer these questions and provide details on how you can neutralize the threat of S3 bucket takeovers.