Strong Consistency in S3 and Cloud Block Store

From my armchair in the past few weeks, I have been watching the myriad of announcements at re:Invent by AWS and a few things caught my eye (well a lot of things did, but a few in particular to storage).

The first thing to note was the change in the consistency model in S3. Up until now, consistency was “eventual” within S3 for certain operations like changes to a file, and there are a ton of posts that do a great job of explaining this. One is below:

https://dhruvsharma-50981.medium.com/s3-eventual-data-consistency-model-issues-and-tackling-them-47093365a595

Google “S3 eventual consistency” and you will find tons of examples.

At a high level, when modifying or deleting objects the change may not be immediately reflected. So on an immediate subsequent read, you may not get what you wrote. For busy environments with high change rates/modifications this could lead to corruption. So you needed to understand the behavior and build to or around it.

At re:Invent, AWS announced that strong consistency is now supported for S3 operations:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-update-strong-read-after-write-consistency/

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/consistency/

What you write is what you get. Fantastic!

So what does this have to do with Cloud Block Store? Read on.

Continue reading “Strong Consistency in S3 and Cloud Block Store”

Exporting/Importing a Certificate with the Pure1 PowerShell Module

When deployed on Windows, the Pure1 PowerShell Module takes advantage of Windows-based certificates in the user (or specified) certificate store. On Linux or MacOS, it uses RSA private key pairs.

To relocate authentication on a Non-Windows machine to another non-Windows machine, you just copy the private key from wherever it is to the target. For Windows though you need to export the cert (which has a private key) from the certificate store, then you can copy the file to wherever.

In the latest release of the Pure1 PowerShell module (1.4.3.1) there is a new feature to do that for you–or at least simplify the process of exporting the cert with the right settings.

Let’s walk through exporting and then importing the cert. In a future post I will go into some of the other enhancements in this release in more detail.

As always the repo is here (and release notes) and it is best installed/updated via the PowerShell Gallery:

install-module PureStorage.Pure1
or
update-module PureStorage.Pure1

https://github.com/PureStorage-OpenConnect/PureStorage.Pure1

Continue reading “Exporting/Importing a Certificate with the Pure1 PowerShell Module”