About BenBen Whaley is a staff software engineer at Chime. Ben is co-author of the UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, the de facto standard text on Linux administration, and is the author of two educational videos: Linux Web Operations and Linux System Administration. He is an AWS Community Hero since 2014. Ben has held Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certifications. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Univ. of Colorado, Boulder.Links Referenced:
Chime Financial: https://www.chime.com/

alternat.cloud: https://alternat.cloud

Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamthewhaley

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benwhaley/

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Forget everything you know about SSH and try Tailscale. Imagine if you didn't need to manage PKI or rotate SSH keys every time someone leaves. That'd be pretty sweet, wouldn't it? With Tailscale SSH, you can do exactly that. Tailscale gives each server and user device a node key to connect to its VPN, and it uses the same node key to authorize and authenticate SSH.Basically you're SSHing the same way you manage access to your app. What's the benefit here? Built-in key rotation, permissions as code, connectivity between any two devices, reduce latency, and there's a lot more, but there's a time limit here. You can also ask users to reauthenticate for that extra bit of security. Sounds expensive?Nope, I wish it were. Tailscale is completely free for personal use on up to 20 devices. To learn more, visit snark.cloud/tailscale. Again, that's snark.cloud/tailscaleCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn and this is an episode unlike any other that has yet been released on this august podcast. Let’s begin by introducing my first-time guest somehow because apparently an invitation got lost in the mail somewhere. Ben Whaley is a staff software engineer at Chime Financial and has been an AWS Community Hero since Andy Jassy was basically in diapers, to my level of understanding. Ben, welcome to the show.Ben: Corey, so good to be here. Thanks for having me on.Corey: I’m embarrassed that you haven’t been on the show before. You’re one of those people that slipped through the cracks and somehow I was very bad at following up slash hounding you into finally agreeing to be here. But you certainly waited until you had something auspicious to talk about.Ben: Well, you know, I’m the one that really should be embarrassed here. You did extend the invitation and I guess I just didn’t feel like I had something to drop. But I think today we have something that will interest most of the listeners without a doubt.Corey: So, folks who have listened to this podcast before, or read my newsletter, or follow me on Twitter, or have shared an elevator with me, or at any point have passed me on the street, have heard me complain about the Managed NAT Gateway and it’s egregious data processing fee of four-and-a-half cents per gigabyte. And I have complained about this for small customers because they’re in the free tier; why is this thing charging them 32 bucks a month? And I have complained about this on behalf of large customers who are paying the GDP of the nation of Belize in data processing fees as they wind up shoving very large workloads to and fro, which is I think part of the prerequisite requirements for having a data warehouse. And you are no different than the rest of these people who have those challenges, with the singular exception that you have done something about it, and what you have done is so, in retrospect, blindingly obvious that I am emb