The Problem You’re Solving If you’ve ever needed to access a remote server that’s hidden behind another server—like a database on a private network, a development environment, or a production server not directly exposed to the internet—you’ve faced the multi-hop SSH challenge. In a typical scenario: Visualizing the Connection Flow Why ProxyJump Beats Manual SSH…
Your Complete Guide to Setting Up an Ansible Automation Environment
Are you tired of manually configuring servers one by one? Welcome to the world of Ansible, where infrastructure automation becomes simple, repeatable, and scalable. In this guide, I’ll walk you through setting up your first Ansible environment from scratch. Understanding Ansible Components Before diving into configuration, let’s understand the four key pillars of Ansible: YAML:…
Containerised Application Triggering SSIS on Host: Insights and Challenges
The Problem When I containerised a Node.js application (using Podman on RHEL), I faced a challenge:The app needed to trigger SSIS packages (.dtsx files) using dtexec. SSIS was installed on the host, but not inside the container. Why not install SSIS in the container? So, how do we trigger SSIS from a container without installing…
Fixing Inter-Container Communication in Podman: Solving the Silent DNS Failure
My Podman containers on a custom network couldn’t resolve each other by name — even though everything looked correct. After methodically eliminating layers (network config, DNS daemon, container state, firewall), I discovered UFW was silently blocking UDP port 53 on the new podman4 bridge interface. The fix? One ufw allow rule. Here’s how I got…
RabbitMQ vs. Kafka: A Practical Guide to Choosing Your Message Broker
Introduction When designing modern, distributed systems—especially cloud-hosted microservices—choosing the right messaging backbone is critical. Two of the most popular options are RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka. While both enable asynchronous communication, they were built for different use cases.
Architectural Option Analysis: Securing Data Flow from Shopify Webhooks to an API Behind Kong Gateway
When integrating Shopify webhooks with an internal API protected by the Kong API Gateway, one of the first—and most critical—challenges you’ll encounter is authentication. Shopify signs its webhook payloads using an HMAC-SHA256 signature, which is delivered in a custom HTTP header (x-shopify-hmac-sha256). Unfortunately, this doesn’t align neatly with standard authentication mechanisms, especially those built into…
A Practical Guide to AWX: From Setup to Automation
Introduction to AWX AWX is the open source upstream project for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, providing a web-based interface, REST API, and task engine for Ansible. It helps teams manage automation at scale with role-based access control, scheduling, and workflow orchestration. 0. AWX Structure Overview 1. Creating an Organization Organizations are the highest level…
How to Validate the HMAC Hash in Kong Gateway for Shopify Webhooks
When integrating Shopify webhooks with Kong Gateway, one common challenge is validating the HMAC signature provided by Shopify. At the time of writing, there is no built-in Kong plugin that can directly read and validate the HMAC value passed in the X-Shopify-Hmac-Sha256 header. Shopify does not allow customizing this header to use Kong’s standard HMAC…
Unit vs Integration vs End-to-End Testing: What’s the Difference and Why It Matters
Testing is the backbone of reliable software development. But with so many testing strategies—Unit, Integration, and End-to-End (E2E)—it’s easy to get confused about what each one does and when to use them. In this post, we’ll break down these three approaches, their purpose, and how they fit into a robust testing strategy.
Breaking Barriers: Enabling Seamless Information Flow Across the Enterprise
In today’s fast-paced digital world, organisations thrive on their ability to access and share information effortlessly. Yet, many still struggle with data trapped in silos, disconnected systems, and fragmented communication. The solution? A boundaryless approach to information flow, where information can flow freely and securely across different systems, departments, and organisations—without being blocked by technical…