Blog

  • HashiCorp Vault Hardening and Compliance Using Chef InSpec

    • September 30, 2018
    • Posted by: Martez Reed
    • Category: Chef, Chef InSpec, Compliance, HashiCorp, HashiCorp Vault, InSpec, Secrets Management, Tools, Training
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    HashiCorp Vault is quickly becoming the de facto secrets management platform used in environments that rely on DevOps concepts for application delivery. Vault is incredibly easy and simple to get started with, but takes a bit of thought and planning to operationalize it. One of the challenges is ensuring that the installation of your security

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  • From the Briefing Room: A Look Into Enterprise Service Management

    • September 26, 2018
    • Posted by: Ryan Hale
    • Category: AHEAD, AHEAD Lab and Briefing Center, Certifications, Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Management, Compliance, Customers, Digital Transformation, Education, Enterprise IT, ESM, ITSM, Partners, ServiceNow, Strategy and Design, Thought Leadership, Tools, Training
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    Enterprise Service Management (ESM) has become a pillar on which AHEAD has developed a reputation as a trusted advisor. AHEAD was just recognized with both ServiceNow Gold Services and Gold Sales partner status—the highest level partner designation for the ESM platform. The designation was based on AHEAD’s experience, expertise, competencies, and specializations below: As AHEAD’s

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  • Designing High Availability for HashiCorp Vault in AWS

    • September 17, 2018
    • Posted by: Bryan Krausen
    • Category: AWS, Design, DevOps, DR, Enterprise IT, HashiCorp, HashiCorp Vault, Performance Replication, Replication, Secrets Management, Security, Tools, VPC
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    As businesses increasingly look to adopt DevOps practices and culture within their organizations, it’s not uncommon for new tools to be introduced to provide additional capabilities for automation and build pipelines. One of these key tools that organizations are quickly adopting places a spotlight on a subject long overlooked by many: secrets management. A secrets

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  • AWS Custom Resources

    • September 12, 2018
    • Posted by: Eric Shanks
    • Category: AWS, Cloud Computing, CloudFormation, Lambda, Tools, Training
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    We love to use AWS CloudFormation to deploy our environments. It’s like configuration management for our AWS infrastructure in the sense that we write a desired state as code and apply it to our environment. But sometimes, there are tasks that we want to complete that aren’t part of CloudFormation. For instance, what if we

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  • From Zero to Cloud in Minutes: Let’s Take a Vote

    • September 7, 2018
    • Posted by: Isaac Johnson
    • Category: Applications, Cloud Computing, Cloud-Native Apps, Education, Microsoft Azure, Public Cloud, Serverless Computing, Tools, Training
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    Getting serverless apps to the cloud can be easy. A common question asked though is, “Where do I start?” However, it can be easier than you may realize to get from zero to the cloud. Let’s start with a common problem: We would like to poll a room an icebreaker question such as, “Would you

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  • 5 Critical Success Factors for the Journey to the Public Cloud

    • August 30, 2018
    • Posted by: Eric Kaplan
    • Category: CIO, Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT, IT Strategy, Migration, Operations, Public Cloud, Thought Leadership
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    (This blog post originally appeared on Information Management.) The pace of cloud adoption continues to accelerate due to its promise of speed, flexibility, and lower costs. And it’s not just tech departments vying for cloud adoption anymore. The C-suite also realizes the many positive effects of the cloud – from empowering frontline employees and decision

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  • How to Set Up Amazon EKS with Mac Client

    • August 21, 2018
    • Posted by: Eric Shanks
    • Category: Amazon EKS, AWS, Cloud Computing, CloudFormation, Containers, Kubernetes, Tools, Training
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    Here at AHEAD, we love Kubernetes. It’s becoming a critical platform for us to manage our containers, but deploying Kubernetes clusters is pretty tedious. Luckily for us, cloud providers such as AWS are helping to take care of these tedious tasks so we can focus on what is more important to us, like building apps.

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  • Nutanix AHV: From Trojan Horse to Flagship Feature

    • August 13, 2018
    • Posted by: Yon Ubago
    • Category: Converged Infrastructure, Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Nutanix, Partners
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    As the Converged Infrastructure (CI) and Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) practice lead at AHEAD, I spend a significant portion of my time evaluating and designing solutions. I wrote my last blog post on Nutanix all the way back in 2016. Back then, Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) was still fairly new having been launched in 2015, and for

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  • Using AWS CodeDeploy to Push New Versions of Your Application

    • August 3, 2018
    • Posted by: Eric Shanks
    • Category: Applications, AWS, CodeDeploy, Configuration Management, Servers
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    Getting new code onto our servers can be done in a multitude of ways these days. Configuration management tools can pull down new code, pipelines can run scripts across our fleets, or we could run around with a USB stick for the rest of our lives. With container-based apps, serverless functions, and immutable infrastructure, we’ve

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  • HashiCorp Vault Storage Backend Decision Tree

    • July 24, 2018
    • Posted by: Martez Reed
    • Category: Architecture, Cloud Computing, HashiCorp, Storage
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    With over 15 supported storage backends, it can be a bit of an arduous task to determine which storage backend should be used for a HashiCorp Vault deployment. The goal of this blog post is to help simplify that process with a simple visual decision tree that accounts for some of the common decision points

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