The Cloud: Taking Back Control of Your Data World

The Cloud: Taking Back Control of Your Data World

I remember when the Internet took off. It was such fun, and where we would set up our own email servers, DNS services, FTP server, and so on. But over the years these services have blended into the background. But, now you can take back control, and centralise your data world. While companies have generally moved to the Cloud, individuals can create their own data world, and take back control. For me, I want to script everything and automate how my data is used. In this way, a single individual in the cloud can be as efficient as a large company.

Over the past week or so, I’ve been making the first steps towards migrating my bare-metal Web infrastructure in 1&1 to AWS. I have been paying 1&1 for five years, and my server was really struggling — with failed disk boots, and so on. So, even though their support was pretty good, I decided that I needed to take back control, and control everything about my server infrastructure. My first worry was cost, and so from over $100 per month, my costs are down to around 75% of this, but I also have backups and snapshots. Along with this, I can easily scale the servers up and down as the demand requires.

I soon found that a core thing to save money is to reduce the size of a volume, as it costs $0.10 per month per GB. So my 500GB disk was soon mirrored down to 250GB (and might go down even more, once things are settled). For me, the cost of the running instance was much less than the volume costs. And then I found that the volumes I wasn’t using were best stored as snapshots, as these cost half as much as a volume (and can also be updated with reduced costs). Then, whenever I need a volume, I just recreate from a snapshot. And so the costs settled after I had set things up, and it is much less than the 1&1 service.

My other main worry was performance, but the new server, with only 2 vCPU and 4GB of memory (as opposed to 6 core and 16GB) was much better. And for the firewalling, it’s a simple connection to a security group, and you immediately lock down RDP and FTP to a single IP address — the 1&1 firewall dashboard was just so clunky with this. Along with this, console access includes MFA, so you feel more secure.

But, that’s not the end. Over the years, I have been registering domains with 1&1 and GoDaddy, and it all gets a bit vague in how these are managed, and how the email and DNS services are set up. So, a big find for me is AWS Route 53, and where I can take back my domains, and run the services I want. And so, with the AWS console, I was back controlling my own domains:

For registering domains, most of us have been hooked by the $2 first-year registration for your domain, but then a hike if you forget about it in the following years. For AWS, it was so simple to search for my domain, release it from GoDaddy or 1$1, and then take over the DNS for it. And, AWS is just upfront about the costs ($12/year), and then a monthly fee for running the DNS service. As far as I can tell, too, the AWS DNS services are fairly bulletproof, and they give you automated privacy settings (without that additional cost from the DNS registrar).

But what about your email? Well, as you have control over your DNS, you can add an MX record, and then set up SMTP for sending automated mail, and also receive them too. For this, it is as simple as setting up an MX record on the DNS, and then a receiving rule on receiving an email, and which is then stored into an S3 bucket. A simple download, and changing it to an EML message, and the emails were viewable. Well, there’s a bit of work to be done on getting this integrate with Outlook, as least you feel like you have your own server and can control what is done with this — and the security of the data.

Yes. I don’t like the lock-in, but I just want a common console for all my data, so AWS fits me fine, and gives me the platform to take asecuritysite.com — and lots of new teaching methods — to the next level. I am to set up a full Docker infrastructure for teaching, and be able to replicate what we have in ESXi. It is not being in the Cloud, it is what you do with it that matters.