In this blog, I’ll focus on the Security Pillar of the well-architected AWS framework and use a reference architecture to showcase some best practices when architecting in AWS.

Versent recently hosted the Men Championing Change (MCC) meetup where “Everyday Sexism” was discussed.

Coming from a microservices background, I hadn't spent a lot of time on data projects. I had done some ETL work with Apache Spark and Flink in the past, but it was not very exhaustive. This time around though, I got first-hand experience doing ETLs and SQL application migration from on-prem Oracle to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Redshift. Here are my learnings on starting out right to maximise your results.

On 1st June 2019, I will join 10 of my Versent teammates, and 50 others to ride 650kms from Hann River Road House (outside of Cairns) to the top of Australia, arriving at Cape York eight days later. Holy sh*t.

AWS Summit Sydney 2019 was, for me at least, summed up by a few words I heard repeated throughout the event: “This is the slowest pace of change we’re ever going to experience. If there was ever a period of time in history, you’d pick to be alive in, you’d pick this time right now.”

Balance is not solely a women's responsibility, nor is it only faced by women.

Have you started a planned sprint only to realise hidden dependencies? Thought your stories were adequately analysed, and realised mid-sprint that they were not really sprint ready? Relax, you are not alone, and we have a simple solution to ensure you have some fun and experience successful sprint after sprint.

DevSecOps Pt. 2 - What do we really mean by DevSecOps?

A summary of the top 25 sessions at AWS re:Invent that are (ideally) the most relevant to you.

I’ve been to many tech events over my career, but none quite like AWS re:Invent… What makes AWS re:invent so different? Two words. "IT'S MASSIVE!"

Lessons learned from my recent formal negotiation training.

Why public cloud was never really a problem for security, and how DevOps has revolutionised the security landscape.

Migrating to the cloud isn't as easy as 1-2-3. The cloud is not just another data centre. ‍Marrying up your services to make the most of public cloud services takes planning, design and, sometimes, refactoring.

Why choose serverless?

Oops. I may not have entirely intended to travel all over the world in just 10 days, but I was excited to have been selected to speak at some of the world’s top security conferences: Container Camp London, DevSecCon Boston and BSides Perth.

Deciding to join Versent was all about timing. When I met the founders of Versent for the first time, the business was just a year old. Their passion for starting something with a Big Hairy Audacious Goal to change the IT industry, was actually pretty contagious.

Here we go again… “What was good?”, “What was bad?”, “What should we change?” Let’s create a pile of action items and stick them somewhere to collect dust until the next retrospective...

“I want to create a world where women aspiring to be engineers aren’t faced with hurdles that our male peers do not experience…”

Culture is hard to build and easy to lose. We are not a start-up anymore, we are experiencing exponential growth, we are growing up and as we continue to grow the business, it is so important to keep the fabric of who we are and why we are different.

What does it mean to be Well-Architected? Why should you even consider it?

Working at a tech company, it’s common to hear the emphasis on ‘continuous learning’, but it’s a different thing entirely to truly see it in action.

Container Camp Australia, the top conference for container technologies, did not disappoint.

Block chain and AI have become the buzzwords of tech today. I often get asked by customers how they can leverage block chain in their digital transformation programs. My answer is always the same – to make new tech work properly, you really need solid tech foundations already in play, and this includes landing APIs for reuse, microservices for agility and AWS for elasticity and scale.

We’ve all seen it happen. You read about a security breach almost every other week and you think that it won’t happen to you… until it does. Here’s how Amazon Systems Manager (SSM) can help you patch your s_it and avoid being exposed.

At Versent we empower our customers with the ability to extract insights and predictions from their most important asset, their data. The best way to do this is with a Data Lake.

I didn’t know it yet, but I was about to face one of the biggest challenges in my career. With a new project in micro-services coming up, I was going to learn how to unlearn to be successful.

Last week, myself and the Versent security team attended the inaugural Sydney DevSecOps meetup. I was excited to see 70+ people in attendance, from a range of industries and a breadth of roles: from the more obvious DevOps engineers to audit and compliance officers.

In the tech industry, where you will typically find more men than women, it was wonderful to see our team in Sydney and Melbourne come together and willingly #PressforProgress – this year's focus for IWD.

I could write an entire blog post about how interesting and unique Las Vegas is as a city, or how logistically impressive it is to run a conference at that scale, or the multitude of new services and features that were released this year. But instead, I’m going to write one about a few of the key things that I took away from re:Invent this year.

This is my first AWS re:invent and I was really excited to meet and hear from other professionals on how AWS has changed their companies for the better. I had a lot of interesting conversations with SaaS providers and other vendors about security in cloud, multi-cloud environments, chaos engineers, security at scale.

As one does on a sunny Melbourne afternoon, I began pondering about the changing face of trust in security and cloud. The east wind is coming, my dear Watson and some of us are in the thick of it as I write this. I am referring to the evolution of trust in cloud providers.

Working in the security field, I often find there is a common perception of the stereotypical security professional who says ‘no’. There are a growing number of security consultants who have come to approach new projects and clients with the response ‘yes - if….’. Security was not and has never been about holding the business back, the mission has always been to protect the business by enabling them to take the ‘right’ risks and doing it ‘right’. By doing security 'right', the business as a whole can reap the benefits.

Imagine a scenario where you fire a command, and it doesn’t return anything! Zilch! Or an API endpoint you requested something of, doesn’t give you anything that’s useful. Just the dreaded “500: Internal Server Error”?

“People before commercials” - Versent CEO & Co-Founder, Thor Essman.

In this article, I will give a bit of an insight into the difference between people’s instinctive feelings and a clear headed rational assessment of their security, some thinking on how this gap arises, and some implications for us as business people and general citizens.

Australia’s suicide rate is currently the highest it has been in the past decade. With over 3,000 individuals taking their own lives in 2015, it remains the primary cause of death amongst Australians between the ages of 15 and 44. The demographics hit hardest by it are indigenous communities and men, who are three times more likely to take their own lives than women.

After spending many years as a managed services engineer and as many years again managing teams of service engineers, learning to deal with the highs of a successful improvement activity (hero!) and the lows of a service outage (villain!) can be a challenge. Keeping on the right path during the time in-between is a balancing act of proactive and progressive engineering, relentless pursuit of automation, closing the feedback loop with those building the systems and communicating with the client.

Traditionally, security is perceived as a barrier towards a positive user experience; these expectations have shifted over the last decade. If we open up our current banking or email app on our phone, we expect both security and a positive user experience. Give us one without the other and you can bet that customers will be looking elsewhere, and especially with tens, sometimes hundreds of other options, depending upon the context, the switching cost may be relatively low.

Defects, as it turns out, can be spotted by an algorithm. Throw a skilled critical investigator (tester) in the mix and teams are getting better at writing code to inspect, detect and report on the quality of the software. Do it for new functionality, do it for every change, do it across the units and the system as whole and as far as inspecting for defects is concerned, there’s quality assurance for you right there. Or is it?

You don’t have to look far to recognise that the fastest growing businesses have data at the core of their growth model. To replicate the success of companies with data at their core such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber and others companies worldwide have responded by seeing to tap the deep pools of potential stored within their databases and log files.

Regulators are putting an increasing focus on ensuring that organisations are protecting the privacy of their customer's information, and it will continue to become more of an issue. Conservative organisations think of information as belonging to them, not their customers. But this presents an opportunity for new players to revolutionise the consumer landscape, and allow consumers to take back ownership.

With how rapidly modern technology is changing, we all understand the importance of keeping our technical skills up to date to stay relevant, whether that be by learning the latest Javascript framework or by familiarizing yourself with a new and innovative containerisation platform. What far fewer of us seem to understand is the importance of constantly evaluating and updating our softer skills.

I put off for quite a while watching the recent Jobs movie as I was convinced it wouldn’t be accurate, and instead would descend into some sort of a grovelling attempt to gloss over the more unpleasant episodes of the Steve Jobs story. I got ambushed by my family one night and so I found myself sitting down watching in apprehension, but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised that it appeared to be a fairly honest version of events.

As proud partners, we are excited to announce that Service NSW has been recognised at the global Identity Excellence Awards as winners of the ‘Customer Experience’ category for winning customers over with secure, engaging experiences.

With all of their accolades and rapid success, it is hard to believe that Versent are only 3 years old this July. In 3 years, they have built a business with over 130 staff, across 3 major Australian cities.

Is my cloud environment secure? What is my security posture in cloud? Is any of my sensitive information available on the internet through my cloud platform?

Enterprise and large organisations typically need a multi-account strategy to support the requirements of running their AWS ecosystem. It is important to setup the accounts in a consistent fashion, at the start, to ensure simple management and tracking of many AWS accounts in the future. This post looks at ways an organisation may decide to structure their AWS accounts.