Dendory Capital - Blog

One of the many tasks that a cloud consultant may have to do is access a client's cloud environment. Whether you're having someone create some resources in your AWS network, or hiring an auditor to review your security posture, you need to grant them temporary access in order to allow them to do their job, while restricting what they can do based on the type of work they were hired to do. This means you shouldn't trust them with the root account. Instead, let's see how you can do this securely within just a few minutes.Creating an IAM user In order to login to the AWS console, they will need a username and password. To create one, log into your administrator account, click on Services at the top, and use the search function to go to the IAM page: There, click on Users on the left side, and then the Add user button:On the first page, you will have to give your new user a name. Make sure to select something that will be obvious who this user is. Then, you have to select wh…

Technology is at the center of most businesses these days, and when an entrepreneur launches a startup, the need to hire a software developer, full stack engineer, or other type of similar employee as part of the team seems like a natural thing. But the Operations side, or what is commonly referred to as IT, is a less obvious prospect. After all, these days anyone can go to one of many hosting providers and click a few buttons, and they'll have a web site. If you don't have a physical office, then that means no need for IT, right? So what is exactly involved in the Operations side of things, and why is it a crucial part of any business?SecurityWhen you deploy an infrastructure in the cloud, you have to understand the separation of roles. The cloud provider, whether you're talking about a platform like AWS which allows you to create entire VMs, or a site like WordPress which hosts your web site directly, will only handle their own side of the infrastructure. This includes s…

Every business is now a technology company in some way, and just like computers made it into the office a few decades ago, now the cloud is becoming a staple for almost every business. Having worked in many, many client environments, the move to the cloud typically always happens the same way. A department or project manager decides to launch their cloud adoption, which leads to an Azure or AWS tenant being created. Some instances are provisioned, network routes setup, and the deployment grows organically from there.The result of such organic growth tends to be disorganization. Naming conventions are brought in later on, tools are decided on the fly, and even if you use infrastructure-as-code, I've seen many cases where one group is using Terraform, while another is using CloudFormation, and of course there's the break-fix instances where people go into the web console and change things manually. Almost no company older than a couple of years old out there doesn't have a l…

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is a popular buzzword in tech. There are AI firms all over the world. For most people who aren't in the field of AI, it can seem complicated and mysterious, but in fact it really isn't that hard to understand. While you may think AI is out of reach from anyone without a deep math and computer sciences background, you may be surprised to learn that most applications of AI these days don't have anything to do with complex research. In this post I'll go over what AI is, some examples of what it can do, and how you can get started in the field yourself, should you wish to.What is AI?Looking at the definition, AI is intelligence demonstrated by machines, unlike the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals. This is a very broad definition, and as you might expect it includes a lot of different technologies. There are many ways to make computers smarter, and many applications where this can be useful. From text to voice to pictures …

A while back I wrote about how the "work anywhere" culture is taking hold, and that working remotely can't be the exception anymore. People have learned what remote work can look like, and even if it doesn't mean working from home, the concept of working from anywhere is extremely powerful, allowing people to work from an office, a coffee shop, the beach, home, and so on, based on their daily requirements. It brings a lot of fundamental shifts to the way business is done, from no longer needing to commute to a large city every day, to being able to choose your living arrangements that aren't directly tied to your 9-5 job.Another shift we're seeing when it comes to the future of work however is that we're moving away from the traditional employment model to a much more fluid, dynamic setting. A few decades ago, it was expected that someone would become employed by a corporation, work 9-5 every day, and stay there for years if not their whole life. Now ever…

As any IT worker would tell you, having proper backups is crucial in any environment. Whether they're done on local hard disks, tape drives or remote locations, having a proper backup solution that includes incremental saves is very important so you can restore data at any point in time, as needed.The same is true for cloud resources, and many people forget that it's not Amazon, Microsoft or Google's role to make sure you don't lose data. Even though a cloud instance you run in AWS is far less likely to lose data than a local VM, thanks to the cloud's natural robustness and all the systems in place to ensure high availability, the chance for a critical hardware failure still exists. There's also room for user error or bad actors coming in and erasing data.If you use AWS, backups can be handled in a very easy way thanks to a service called AWS Backup. It's one of the many features offered by Amazon, and it allows you to schedule backups according to one or m…