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State Farm Engineering

Information contained in the articles on this site may not be representative of actual use cases. The views expressed in the articles are personal views of the author and are not necessarily those of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, its subsidiaries and affiliates (collectively “State Farm”). Nothing in the articles should be construed as an endorsement by State Farm of any non-State Farm product or service.
AWS Multi-Account Management using Cloud Custodian and Serverless Compute by Ryan Ash
A simple and scalable approach to using Cloud Custodian for AWS governance, security and cost controls.

multi-tenant-cloud-custodian

Whether administering three or 300 AWS accounts, it is essential to implement consistent security and governance policies. Enabling users to leverage all the AWS services while remaining within the guardrails defined by your company is the goal. Polices should be relatively easy to create and implement. Having a stable deployment and runtime for these policies allows administrators to focus their valuable time elsewhere. Cloud Custodian policies provide flexibility to write governance rules in…

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Actuators in Action by Billy Malone
A Site Reliability Engineer's guide to using actuators effectively

A ships main control panel

Want to learn about actuators and which ones may benefit you from a Site Resiliency Engineering (SRE) perspective? This article is for you!

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DynamoDB Ingestion to an Enterprise Data Lake by Clete Blackwell II
A journey in discovering architectural patterns

DynamoDB Ingestion to Data Lake Design

Companies manage a lot of data – often having application data in many different data stores and in a variety of formats (e.g., File storage, DB2, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, and more). That data can also live on many different physical data centers ranging from on-premises to vendor data centers to public cloud data centers. Each data store is created for a specific purpose, such as customer contact information, conversation logs, policy data, or purchase history.

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Red Team Research - Runspace Debugging by Michael Garrison
Finding creative opportunities for code execution and lateral movement

red team research

Tldr; Runspace debugging is a cool feature added into the .NET framework that allows developers to attach to a PowerShell Host (PSHost) process to debug a script. Once a process instantiates the PSHost, it never goes away, even if the runspace object is disposed. I submitted it as a bug to Microsoft and hopefully it will be fixed in the future. This can be used as a neat way to execute PowerShell code under someone else’s legitimate process or PowerShell session.

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The Coding Circle by Samantha Roska & Susan DeGennaro
Women Supporting Women at State Farm

women talking on a bench

March is Women’s History Month, a time to celebrate the past contributions of women while making progress toward a more equitable future. There is much to celebrate about the contributions by women in the field of information technology. However, although more women are choosing IT careers, studies show that additional progress can be made.

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Comparison of AWS Services for Event Driven Architecture by Jeff Himmell

Complicated highway interchange denotes the many possible paths

At State Farm® we’re about helping people. Helping people manage the risks of everyday life and recover from the unexpected is at the core of what we do. As it applies to technology, the Event Driven Architecture (EDA) pattern is especially useful for orchestrating multiple services in unforeseen situations. However, deciding on the best AWS product to use as the event bus can be daunting. This article will cover common considerations (such as scalability), as well as those that can make a bad…

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Using Terraform for S3 Storage with MIME Type Association by Dillon Henn
Confidently deploy your content to S3 using Terraform - here's how we did it.

terraform

Today, many product teams may utilize the Amazon Simple Storage Service to store Single Page Application (SPA) resources. Oftentimes they do this by packaging infrastructure code with the application code. However, this tends to add complexity to the pipeline because the content for S3 must be uploaded and synched in a separate step.

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Using a Community Support model by Karl Cardenas
Why your organization should embrace the Community Support model

DevEx

It’s tough to find an organization that is not leveraging a public cloud platform. With all the SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS providers out there, chances are you’ve used cloud services in some manner. As public cloud utilization continues to ramp up in many industries (e.g., insurance, financial, business), organizations are encountering a new challenge: how to correctly consume these new platforms and technologies. It’s a workforce challenge more so than it is a technical challenge.

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