Weekly Journal 55 - Bitwarden, LastPass, AWS Transit Gateway

Weekly Journal
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tl;dr

This week I finally finished my migration to Bitwarden and learned a couple helpful tips for working with AWS Transit Gateway. Sadly, I spent a good portion of my time clearing snow.

Bitwarden

I have been a LastPass user for several years now. From a user experience standpoint, they have a great product. Out of all the services I’ve tried, the have the best user interface hands down. However, I don’t feel I can truly trust a proprietary product. So a couple months ago I started a migration to Bitwarden. While it’s not quite as nice as LastPass, it has a pretty nice interface too. More importantly, it’s open source and I feel better about supporting it financially.

This past week I finally finished my account reconciliation and deleted my LastPass account. It’s nice to have that finally completed.

Transit Gateway

We’re starting a new project at work, and part of it involves using AWS Transit Gateway (TGW) to route network traffic among several different AWS accounts. After consulting with our AWS support team, I learned a couple of network architecture tips for working with Transit Gateway in a multi-account model.

The first tip is you can use AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) to share a Transit Gateway with multiple accounts. This allows you to put the TGW into a shared infrastructure account, and then share it with all the other accounts that need to use it. Once the sharing is enabled, the other accounts can create attachments to the TGW as needed.

The second tip is you can have more than one TGW in an account. This is useful for separating different types of network traffic. For example, if you need to route traffic for our internal services and you need to integrate with external partners and customers, you can create two Transit Gateways to keep the two types of traffic separated. Having two gateways helps to simplify the configuration to ensure you aren’t accidentally leaking traffic to networks where it doesn’t belong.

What’s Next?

According to the weather reports, I will be clearing more snow. Hopefully I’ll have some time to get more notes into Dendron.