Enabling CloudFront access logs is a basic way of monitoring incoming requests. However, CloudFront writes these logs as gzip packed files into S3, which makes a convenient analysis difficult. AWS Glue together with AWS Athena allows the use of SQL to query these logs and this post explains the steps to deploy the necessary infrastructure with CDK 2.

Mastodon is free and open source and everyone can host their own instance. However, very small instances have disadvantages such as wasting resources while the large ones suffer from typical centralization effects. Joining a trustworthy mid-sized instance of choice is a good compromise.

Enabling Docker images to be built in Docker containers can be annoying at times. In this post, I show how I solve this problem using kaniko, with the goal of building Docker images in GitLab pipelines with a self-hosted Kubernetes-based GitLab runner and pushing them into a private Docker registry.