56K.Cloud launches theByte.io online Training & Coaching platform with its first course Traefik Training

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56K.Cloud Launches theByte.io Training Platform

It's incredible to think that 56K.Cloud is celebrating its third birthday. Three
years ago, Darragh and I boarded a train from Zurich, Switzerland direction of
Austria for our first customer project as 56K.Cloud. This trip marked our first
customer project. We were still finalizing the company registration, setting up
accounting, and generally just getting setup, but that didn't stop us from
boarding the train and getting started.

Brian & Darragh first project as 56K.Cloud - 2017In late 2017 th

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56K.Cloud Update: Brian is Stepping Down

Water is super important! as a raw asset to all of us, our life rotates around
it and our accessibility to access it in a clean, safe way is equally as
important. That said, clean drinking water is part of this. Here we learn about
a project we are building up together with Edeltech and Waterscope, on how we
can enable the productization of their water testing solution for the Swiss
utility market.

How did we come about this project? As the technology is built on ARM and Cloud.
One of our colle

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56K.Cloud and Edeltech join Waterscope in Valais, Switzerland on an IoT Water testing workshop

Join us on 29th September for the AWS Swiss Cloud Day in Oerlikon, Zurich. We
will be present there with many other AWS Partners.

To sign-up and collect a surprise gift at our booth, drop your details here and
we would be happy to welcome you to our booth!

Looking forward to meeting you there.

(Impression from AWS Zurich Summit 2019)

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56K.Cloud at AWS Swiss Cloud Day (29.09.2019)

At the beginning of this year we moved our office (yes believer it or not, we
have had an office). Why we moved and why we keep a central point and purpose of
having a "brick and mortar" location we will share in this blog post. 

For the last 3 years we've been located in a number of Regus/Spaces office, for
both the location and corporate co-working model.  That served us well and you
can read more about it in a previous blog post =>

Why the move?
But as our cloud work evolved more and more t

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56K.Cloud moves to Technopark Winterthur

56K.Cloud reached AWS Advanced Tier partnership! Cloud, IoT, Migration and SaaS enablement! 

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56K.Cloud reaches AWS Advanced Partner Status!

With the recent announcement of a AWS Swiss Region physically located in
Switzerland, the country known for chocolate and cheese will in the next two
years be able to offer up to 3 availability zones in the next two years, along
with the huge range of AWS services we are all familiar with. From what we know,
the new region will be build in the east of the country where the majority of
Swiss data centers are located. AWS  joins the two other Hyper-scalers: Google
and Microsoft in their commitment

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AWS Committed to Swiss Region in 2022 - ch-central-1 or eu-central-2 ?

This year, we wrote about hosting AWS Outpost and the interfaces in a Swiss
Datacenter context. One of the key topics we showed was "Connectivity Hub."
Having Outpost located in a connectivity heavy data center enables customers to
reduce the effort to bring these interfaces into the cloud while keeping the
ultra-low latency gained by having a local presence. In this blog post, we will
dig deeper into how that works, why Outpost brings these advantages, and reduce
overall operational costs.

AWS

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AWS Outpost Deep-Dive with 56K.Cloud

AWS Announced GA on the much awaited Edge Compute platform Wavelength, 56K.Cloud shares details of the recent announcement and what the impact of 5G Edge Applications will bring

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AWS announces Wavelength and 5G Edge

In just under two weeks, on 6th-8th October 2020, Arm DevSummit 2020 (formally known as Arm TechCon) will be running a three-day, fully online, virtual event. Check out this array of awesome topics, across these 8 tracks
- AI in the Real World: From Development to Deployment
- Building the Internet of things
- Chip Design Methodology
- Cloud Native Developer Experience
- Creating the Next Generation of Interactive Experiences
- Infrastructure of Modern Computing
- Tech for Global Goals
- The Jou

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Arm DevSummit 2020 - just around the corner; Parsec, Cilium and Docker

Why we branded 56K.Cloud
On the same train, going the same direction, aligning teams is key to a
successful cloud journeyInitially we didn’t have a logo, I drew up something
with a black background that was enough for daily business, having been involved
in branding in the past and understanding the value and purpose of it. At the
time, we didn’t need a strong public presence. In the early days of 56K, we were
sha

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Branding a Tech Company to non-Tech

It's real, it's happening in-person and at Barcelona this year! The 56K.Cloud
team will be present together with TelcoDR at Mobile World Congress 2021! This
happens, First as real event and Second as a virtual event! 56K will exhibit at
#CLOUDCITY Booth hosted by TelcoDR! 

> 70% of our communication is physical, visual and feeling related
So why are we attending MWC21? Why In-Person? Why physically? After nearly 1.5
years working with little or no physical presence with customers and partners
i

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Bringing 5G to Developers:  56K.Cloud will be present at #MWC21 - #CLOUDCITY!

In one project I was working on, we migrated a Ruby on Rails application to the
AWS Elastic Container Service. In this project, we used AWS Graviton2. AWS's own
silicon is based on the ARM Neoverse cores (Alpine ALC12B00) 64-bit ARM
processor. After that decision, we looked at the entire stack to see which tools
we needed to adapt. One tool that we use for the building and deployment process
is a container base image. This image was not yet ready to run on the AWS
Graviton processor architecture

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Building Docker Multi-Arch Images with GitLab CI/CD

We at 56K.Cloud, a remote focused and distributed company, have implemented the
following objectives and responsibilities which support our COVID-19 continuity
plan. We are sharing this information as part of a broader effort to ensure
business continuity during this time in the hope that our plan can benefit
others and how the tools and processes we use enable our team, customers, and
partners.

Our top priority is the safety and health of our employees, customers, and
partners.

As our employe

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Business Continuity Plan for COVID-19

In a recent project, we helped our customer to migrate the websites of all their customers to AWS. It was clear from the beginning to use the concept of Infrastructure as Code. Yet, it wasn't so clear, which tool to use. After some evaluation, we decided to use CDK with Typescript. This played into their existing stack. As they already use Typescript for the websites and other toolings.

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is the Infrastructure of Code (IaC) solution from AWS. With this solu

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CDK: Certificate Handling with Custom Resources

Grafana's ability to run in Docker containers and easily connect to AWS
Cloudwatch to grab metrics and logs makes it an ideal candidate for your AWS
infrastructure monitoring needs. 

At 56K.cloud, we usually deploy it as a replacement for the Cloudwatch interface
as we are fans of Grafana's powerful features and look. The easiness with which
it can be run "serverless" and its deployment automated with Terraform
transformed it into a standard piece of our recommended infrastructure.

Before we g

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Deploy Grafana using Docker, AWS ECS and Terraform

Introduction
Gitlab.com allows its users to run their own, self-hosted, Gitlab Runners as
part of their Gitlab CI feature. This comes in handy when the CI jobs have to
run in a user-owned environment or more powerful runners are needed.

If that environment is AWS and you are looking for an automated way of setting
up the Runner(s) on EC2, then stay tuned for a 56k.cloud recipe!

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Deploying a Gitlab Runner on AWS with Packer

...and a hack to turn that PHP site into a static one
Background
For the last few months, we have been in a rebranding process here at 56k.cloud,
that included a brand-new website developed by the awesome team at Twotwentytwo
[http://twotwentytwo.se/]. The finished product that we have received from them
was a site developed in Php with some Node.js built assets. But internally we
decided that we really want a st

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Deploying static sites with GitHub Actions and Netlify

Docker Compose has now been open-sourced the Compose Specification. This allows developers to expand their workflows from development to the public cloud.

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Docker Open Sources Docker Compose Specification

The DockerCon Live 2020 Virtual Conference broke down barriers and enabled the global community to attend and participate. From deep dive sessions, interviews, live coding, and much more DockerCon Live was an amazing experience.

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DockerCon 2020 Live Recap

Docker Turns 7 Years old. We recap a bit the last years and look forward to what is coming next. Also, we offer up some Docker Birthday discounts and challenges.

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Happy 7th Birthday Docker!

Do you need AWS services locally in Switzerland? Together with AWS we are
offering a Managed AWS Outpost deployment(s) with direct connectivity back to an
AWS Region (currently Frankfurt, eu-central-1, soon Ireland).

What does AWS outpost provide?
As many companies and ISV's various requirements to host their own
infrastructure, much of that cost is not directly related to the core business
of the company and its customers. Also the knowledge to run such a complex
deployment becomes a burden. A

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Hosting AWS Outpost for you

In this post we talk about why Apple Macbook M1, MacMini and laptop hardware is
moving "Back to ARM"

> OSX => aarch64 (arm-on-arm)
The reality  of "arm-on-arm developer" just became a whole lot more serious, if
it wasn't already: Apple's move BigSur, to somewhat back to RISC is a big one,
not big in the sence of streamlining there software stack on ARM, because they
already do with iPhone etc... But now taking ARM on the laptop and workstation
is a whole another game, as many of us know these t

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How is Mobile Tech making it's way in the Laptop?

Docker recently released a new feature for ECS. The Docker & ECS integration allows developers to publish containers directly to ECS using the Docker CLI

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How to Deploy Containers Directly to AWS ECS using Docker

The Visual Studio Remote-Containers extension lets you attach VS Code to running containers as if it was running locally on the environment, allowing you to quickly peak and continue development inside running containers.

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How to Develop inside a Container using Visual Studio Code Remote Containers

A tutorial setting up a monitoring stack using Prometheus and Grafana to track Crypto Currencies

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How to Monitor Cryptocurrencies with Docker & Prometheus

Running Microsoft IIS inside a Docker container enables organisations to containerize legacy applications and prepare to run them as modern containers

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How to get started with IIS on Docker

This guide will explain the benefits of configuring Azure AD SSO with Amazon AWS to take advantage of Single Sign-on to the AWS console using your Office365 user. 

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How to setup AWS Single Sign-On with Azure AD

(Packet.net is now Equinix Metal (https://metal.equinix.com/)
Earlier this year we had a workshop with a customer, they where a "very
on-prem/in-house setup", They where thinking "Hybrid-Cloud"  but wanted to see
what Terrafrom was capable of and it's limitations well lets see ;). However no
reason why it's not limited to the big 3 public cloud providers (AWS, Azure and
GCP). On the 1st February 2020 I had to stay up late to watch the Six Nations
live Ireland vs Scotland, so spent the time hacki

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In 20min flat! VMware on Equinix Metal deployed /w Terraform (and watching rugby!)

On the 18th March 2019 at the Hotel Einstein we will co-host together with Amazon Web Services Switzerland an evening in cover Banking in the Cloud. 

This is a co-hosted event with Docker Switzerland Meetup Group
as a special event in St. Gallen about how the finance and bank

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Innovation in Banking, St. Gallen - Apéro (18.03.2020)

Magicbook decided to migrate from Heroku to AWS. During this journey we also modernised Magicbook applications using Serverless and containers (ECS) 

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MagicBook migration from Heroku to AWS

(co-authored together with – Marc Meunier, Sr, Manager Ecosystem Development, Infrastructure Arm and Darragh Grealish, Cloud Engineer and Co-Founder of 56K.Cloud)

Earlier this month, Marc and I hosted a talk at the CNCF where we introduced PARSEC, the security abstraction project for Edge.  During the talk, we demonstrated a use case that showcased the developer experience spanning 5G, IoT and Edge Cloud.  In this blog post we will dig a bit deeper into the design and provide some additional ba

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PARSEC - A Cloud Native Security Framework across Edge, Cloud and IoT

One of our most recent IoT projects has been with AWS and ARM, to enable ParSec
support in Greengrass, If you remember Parsec? It's one of the CNCF projects
56K.Cloud work actively on building content and training, but in this project,
we helped implement a Java Client en and used that java implementation in AWS
Greengrass

Lets take a look at what AWS Greengrass Nucleaes v2 is all about

There were a few activities that lead up to this, for starters with ARM team we
wanted to demonstrate PARSEC

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Parsec support for AWS IoT Greengrass Nuclean - ARM and 56K Demo @ AWS Re:Invent 2021!

Grafana released v5.0 at GrafanaCon last week. It is a significant update packed
with mouth-watering features. I’ve been testing the beta for quite some time and
was very impressed with the maturity already in Beta.

Most people will notice the New Dashboard Engine, UX, and themes as prominent
visual updates. However, down the list of features which to be honest, I missed
the first few times reading the release no

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Provisioning Grafana Datasources and Dashboards Automagically

Deploying new containers has become ridiculously easy (In a good way). Once
containers are running, it is even easier to scale. Doubling or even tripling
the number of running containers can occur with a simple keystroke but can your
container infrastructure handle it?

Much like cars driving on a freeway. All the cars have different shapes, sizes,
and performance. Cars are limited to the capacity of the road. Fre

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Put the Brakes on Docker Containers

Sales and BizDev is vast topic, but well defined business in itself. Something the we had no real talent and experience in. After some moonlighting various business sales meetups (when you could do that) we came across Manual Hartmann. He recently setup a new startup "thesalesplaybook.io"

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Sales Accelerator - Winning deals with TheSalesPlaybook.io

Yeah, that’s a catchy title, I know. For sure, security is important and
complicated. But there are ways to make it easier to apply with less pain. In
the last months, I helped a customer to set up and automate CIS compliant
infrastructure on AWS. Eliminating much of the manual work and complexity
involved with CIS compliance.

I come, like most of you, from a world where you learned so many times how
painful security can be. So I had my reservations when I started working on this
project. But I

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Security is complicated! Or is it actually?

A recent TV series over on Netflix and TNT, that is hot in the media recently
has a very clear underlining story of change and survival. We don't ramble too
much about transformation topics as change is constant and inevitable, it's a
question of who's pushing or pulling, what teams are onboard, and who's driving
the engine. At 56K we are very busy being just that, "the engineers".  (Don't
worry.. no spoiler here)

But how is this related to Snowpiercer; the social and political story that
rotat

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Snowpiercer - The Cloud Transformation Train

After a two-year wait, and anxiety around COVID. The 56K Team was able to
finally attend an in-person event it sponsored along with AWS, House of Test
et.. After a great turn, with almost 50 developers across Switzerland and abroad
that joined for 3 packed days of sessions above in the Swiss Alps. We are happy
to share with you a short look at the sessions contributed by the 56K team

This is the 5th Installment of SocratesCH event which we happy co-organization
along with 42Talents and myself (

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SocratesCH - First post-COVID in-person event /w 56K.Cloud

56K.Cloud received a mention in the Swiss IT Reseller - HyperScale
[https://www.itreseller.ch/] newsletter. Just as we close off June 2020, we'd
like to share a short text from a recent publication where 56K.Cloud was
recognised in DACH by its partnership with AWS. Since 2018 we have been working
actively with Amazon Web Services Switzerland on various global and local
projects (Edeltech migration from Heroku to AWS
[https://blog.56k.cloud/magicbook-migration-from-heroku-to-aws/], Hosting AWS Ou

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Swiss IT Reseller - 56K.Cloud mentioned in Swiss Newsletter

The 56K.Cloud launch, about us, and our mission

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The 56K.Cloud Launch

Learn how 56K.Cloud enabled Zugmap.ch to adopt cloud technology and host on
Exoscale - Swiss Cloud Provider. We share a Q/A and Webinar. 

Since when has 56k.Cloud offered the Exoscale cloud hosting platform? 

56K.Cloud has offered Exoscale services since 2018. Even before we started
offering Exoscale as an offering 56K.Cloud used and still uses internally
Exoscale to power our VPN’s and other internal services.

As a specialist in cloud operations, what does 56k.Cloud particularly appreciate
a

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Use Case - Kanton Zug GIS

Amazon AWS released the Cloud Developer Kit (CDK) to enable developers to deploy cloud resources using a programming language like Typescript, Python, .Net, or Java

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What is AWS Cloud Developer Kit (CDK)

Recently the 56K.Cloud Team visited a 5G Lab, and 5G showcase centre in Zurich, Switzerland. Where there is huge potential for #5G, #IoT and #EdgeCloud applications!. Learn more about 56K.Cloud recent efforts in bring new edge application development. 

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What is the Joint Innovation Center for 5G?

As most of us for a while know that AWS is one of the 3 HyperScalers of global
public cloud vendor offing a Edge Solution. But much more, this post looks at
three services that allow you to run AWS hardware on the edge, on-premise,
managed in various co-locations, or any combination. We also will look at the
recently launched ECS / EKS Anywhere offering which enables AWS managed
containers at the edge. You can gain a majority of the AWS cloud benefits
already today but at the edge. We'll look at

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What's the Difference: AWS Outpost, Wavelength, Snowball Edge?

We are happy to close off 2019 with an exciting year for 56K, partners and our
customers, after reaching great milestones we are happy to kick-off the next
decade with a few exciting 2020 goals!

Highlights
 * Launch the new 56K.Cloud website and Brand! (blog
   [http://https://blog.56k.cloud/branding-a-tech-company-to-non-tech/])
 * Grow the Team, Expand our Presence
 * Community Outreach, Training, and Workshops

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Year 2020 at 56K.Cloud

For the third consecutive year, our team graced the grounds of the AWS annual extravaganza in Zurich. This year, we stepped up as a gold sponsor, occupying a grander booth. And, the results? Absolutely rewarding! With a footfall surpassing 1,800 attendees, our booth buzzed with energy and engagement throughout the day.

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A Day to Remember at AWS Cloud Day Zürich

Wow, one year had come and gone before we realized it. We established 56K.Cloud one year ago December 2018. It has been one heck of a year with amazing achievements considering we started with zero revenue, customers, or projects.

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56K.Cloud year in Review and goals for 2019

Darragh and I traveled last week to DockerCon, located in beautiful San Francisco. We had great weather the entire week, an amazing conference, and made a ton of new connections.

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A Look Back at DockerCon San Francisco

ack in January this year, Darragh and I launched our startup “56K.Cloud”. Darragh and I took time to write down our core values which were both from a company perspective and our experiences important to us and our families, as both of us, are married with kids.

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Bootstrapping a Family Friendly Technology Company

he Internet of Things (IoT) is still in its infancy when compared to web technologies. Many devices or things as IoT refers to them have been connected to some type of system easily for the past 20–30 years.

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Controlling Things with Containers

DockerCon returns to Barcelona after first appearing in the beautiful city back in 2015. A lot has transpired with Docker and the industry since we were last in Barcelona. The community continues to grow, containers have now become the standard when building Cloud Native applications, and now Kubernetes is part of almost every discussion when talking about Orchestration.

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DockerCon 2018 Barcelona Preview

I had the pleasure of working with the head of Experts Live conferences Marcel Zehner when he reached out to interview me for the X-Talk video series. After we recorded the video Marcel introduced me to Experts Live Switzerland and asked if I would be interested to present Docker.

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Experts Live Switzerland 2018

In 2006, in order to get my degree, I had to write a thesis about MPLS networks. I was waiting for servers (racks) to arrive so I could test my code and while waiting, I was looking for a way to test locally patched Linux kernel modules.

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How open source helped me get a good job

Not long ago GitHub and AWS together cross promoted a blog post about triggering new releases in GitHub by pressing an AWS IoT button. This new process got me thinking about how we can use an AWS IoT button together with Docker.

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Trigger Docker builds with an AWS IoT Button

Rerum dicta labore enim at quaerat rerum sunt. Asperiores tempore magni nam dicta inventore. Eligendi omnis quis maxime. Atque commodi dicta unde quam. Sequi beatae laudantium. Consequatur consequatur rem sint commodi.

From the blog