Jacob Marks

Note: I originally sketched this post years ago and never finished it. I’m publishing it now as a retrospective on how I think about VPC Flow Logs at scale. VPC Flow Logs: Use Them Intentionally For a long time, the default guidance in AWS environments was simple: enable VPC Flow Logs everywhere. At small to moderate scale, that advice is usually fine. At large scale, it becomes expensive, noisy, and often redundant. There’s an inherent catch-22 with Flow Logs. If you don’t have them enabled, you miss historical data when you need it. If you enable them universally, you can generate massive volumes of duplicated traffic data that few teams ever analyze in a meaningful way. At sufficient scale, AWS can perform network-level analysis across its infrastructure independent of whether an individual account is exporting Flow Logs. Because of that, Flow Logs are not always treated internally as a hard security requirement for every workload. I argued for that shift myself, main...

When loading certificates into a BIG-IP LTM to configure trusted chains, you often need to create a certificate bundle . This bundle is attached to an SSL profile to advertise accepted certificates during an SSL handshake or to provide the full chain of trust to a client machine. A certificate bundle is simpler than it sounds: it is merely a series of Base64 encoded certificates listed sequentially in a single text file. Follow these steps to create and import yours. Manual Steps to Create a Bundle: Create a text file: Use a plain text editor like Notepad or TextEdit. Assemble the Chain: Copy the Base64 encoded text for each certificate in your chain (Server > Intermediate > Root) and paste them into the file one after another. Ensure there are no extra spaces between the -----END CERTIFICATE----- and -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- tags. Navigate to Import: On your BIG-IP device, go to: System > Certificate Manag...