Jhuk Tech News

I wired up a GitHub Actions pipeline that runs terraform plan in the PR prior to merge. However before Terraform can pull the reality state of my existing AWS infrastructure to compare against terraform.tfstate and declarative *.tf files, the CI pipeline first needs to assume a properly scoped AWS IAM role. The mechanism for this depends on OIDC federation. This post walks through the technical procedure of issuing an OIDC token from the .yml pipeline, how the AWS IAM console is used to define authorization parameters, and finally how the CI pipeline uses those temporary AWS credentials to complete its Terraform job.

While cleaning up the CloudFront configuration for this blog, I removed a www.jhuk.tech → jhuk.tech 301 redirect that I assumed was redundant. My reasoning was simple: if both hostnames point at the same CloudFront distribution and the same S3 bucket, then both should serve the same site. Why force a redirect at all?

After deploying the change, I noticed something strange. The apex domain https://jhuk.tech rendered perfectly, but https://www.jhuk.tech returned the same page as a wall of unstyled HTML — no theme, no layout, no JavaScript. Two URLs, the same bytes on the server, two completely different experiences in the browser. This post is a breakdown of why that happened and the tradeoffs I weighed before settling on a fix.

For years, I used a managed WordPress instance behind a cPanel host to write this blog. Initially it was a great way to learn. I was able to abstract away hosting-as-a-service. But Wordpress exposes an administrative login page and my comments section was open to the public internet which resulted in many cybersecurity issues such as brute-force authentication and botnets posting XSS payloads and gambling links. As my interests grew farther into cloud and DevOps, I wanted my own site to reflect the way I now think about infrastructure—version-controlled, reproducible, and declarative in nature.

In the field of Cybersecurity and DevOps, there is no substitute for hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure. To further my own practice, I have recently started diving into the Microsoft Azure ecosystem. It’s an excellent sandbox for learning with $100 in credits and 750 hours of B1s compute, you have exactly what you need to keep a single VM instance running 24/7 while you experiment.

For this project, I set out to deploy a custom Nginx web server on a Linux VM. Here is a breakdown of the configuration and the logic behind my deployment.

I use Python locally within Visual Studio Code to call a public API. The goal of this exercise is not only to make a successful HTTP request, but also to understand the individual parts of a small Python script that interacts with a real internet service.

A good beginner API for this type of project is the GitHub REST API. This API is useful because it allows new developers to practice with real-world data while learning concepts that commonly appear in professional software development. These concepts include HTTP status codes, JSON responses, environment variables, API tokens, error handling, and storing project dependencies in a local virtual environment.