GCP Load Balancers with Terraform

Networking in GCP, or any cloud environment, often requires a load balancer(LB). If you try to use Terraform to deploy a load balancer in GCP you’ll notice that there is not a single Terraform resource to create a GCP LB. GCP provides example Terraform scripts to create LBs in their documentation here. However, if you have an understanding of how load balancers work internally, and how to properly structure your Terraform code, creating your own LB modules in GCP using Terraform is possible. This can allow you to configure your LBs to do exactly what you need. ...

Wed, Mar 22, 2023 · 6 min · Olivia Snowden

Getting Started with Ansible

In this post: What is Ansible Installing Ansible Authentication Inventories Playbooks Testing Ansible What is Ansible? Ansible is an open-source infrastructure as code tool provided by Red Hat. Instead of agents, Ansible relies on SSH to pass tasks defined in YAML to remote machines. To get familiar with Ansible, I created a simple scenario where a bash script needed to be uploaded to a remote machine and ran periodically. ...

Thu, Jan 13, 2022 · 5 min · Olivia Snowden

Automate Replacing JSON Values with Python

In this post: Intro JSON File CSV File Python Script Writing the Python Script I was recently tasked with automating the replacement of key:value pairs in a JSON file. The goal was to take the output of a CLI command listing key:value pairs and place those keys/values in specific places within a JSON file. I decided to convert the output of the CLI command to a CSV file and have a python script use that CSV to create a new JSON file with updated keys/values. ...

Wed, Dec 22, 2021 · 7 min · Olivia Snowden

Static Blog with Hugo, Git, and AWS

Until now, the blog I use to document my projects has been hosted on WordPress. To cut down on the cost of running my blog (and to complete a cool project), I’ve made my blog a static website. Most websites we visit are dynamic websites, meaning that a web server generates the site with content that can change and be interacted with by users. Static websites are the opposite, they display the same content for every user and are shown exactly as they are written (usually using HTML). ...

Mon, Aug 30, 2021 · 9 min · Olivia Snowden

Python Methods and Classes

Once you get past your first “Hello World” Python script, it’s good to learn how to use Python methods and classes. Methods and **functions **are a self-contained block of code that can be reused over and over. There are built-in functions that beginners in Python may already be familiar with, like print() and sum(). A user can also define a function (called a user-defined function) that executes a task they need done in their script multiple times. This is especially useful because it keeps the user from having to write that same chunk of code repeatedly. Variables that exist outside of the function can be passed to the function as parameters, but they are not required. The format of defining your own function is below: ...

Mon, Jan 18, 2021 · 5 min · Olivia Snowden

Neural Networks and Tensorflow - Capstone Pt.1

Over the next year, I will be completing a research project exploring how biased training data effects the machine learning algorithm of self-driving cars. This project, which I’ll detail in a later post, involves deep neural networks (DNNs), computer vision, linear algebra, and more. Is this project a massive undertaking? Yes. Will that stop me? Absolutely not. Let’s get started. Neural Network Basics First, what is artificial intelligence (AI)? AI is a field of computer science pertaining to programming computers so that they demonstrate human-like intelligence. ...

Wed, Nov 11, 2020 · 6 min · Olivia Snowden