Yesterday, HashiCorp announced a new “free” tier for Terraform Cloud.

For the past few years, I’ve been gradually implementing and extending a Flask web app that I use to automate the management of some of my side projects (i.e., CloudSecList, CloudSecBooks).

This app started as a simple project with a few endpoints deployed locally via docker-compose, to a not-so-simple-anymore application that automates multiple parts of my side projects. I have now reached a state where I need more than a local deployment, as I might need to perform some quick operations when I don’t have my laptop with me. So I started looking at options to deploy it safely on AWS without exposing it directly to the public Internet, as it is an admin-like interface.

This is going to be a short blog post detailing another migration I undertook to simplify my current stack.

This time, I replaced SES with Cloudflare Email Routing for incoming emails across my domains.

As you might know, I’m working on my next side-project, The CloudSec Engineer, a book on entering, establishing yourself, and thriving in the cloud security industry as an individual contributor.

As part of the book’s introduction, I’ve been researching common career pathways within the security industry to contextualise where Cloud Security fits into the big picture.

I’ve always wanted to setup a Pi-hole to block advertisements in my home office, but, at the same time, I didn’t want physical boxes lying around to maintain (plus, I do hate cables).

In this blog, I’ll explain how I managed to mimic the Pi-hole’s behaviour using only serverless technologies (Cloudflare Gateway, to be precise).