About
I am Mehdi Laruelle, a Platform Engineer and SRE based in France.
For ten years I have been building and running the platforms other engineers deploy on: the infrastructure, the CI/CD pipelines and everything in between that takes an application from a commit to production. Secrets management is the subject I keep coming back to and it is what most of the articles here are about.
I am a firm believer in free knowledge, open and available to everyone. Sharing what I learn is part of the job as I understand it: I teach, I speak at conferences and I write in both languages, because good technical material in French is still harder to find than it should be.
What I work on
- AWS, broadly: serverless, security, monitoring, networking and cost, along with the services these articles lean on: IAM and IAM Identity Center, S3, CloudFront, API Gateway, Route 53 and ACM. I work on everything around an application, multi-region ones included, up to landing zones defined at the scale of a whole organisation.
- Terraform: modules, the registry protocol and running it from CI without a long-lived cloud credential anywhere.
- HashiCorp Vault: authentication methods, static and dynamic secrets, Encryption as a Service and Vault Agent. I have run Vault in production with both Consul and Raft as its storage backend.
- Kubernetes: I have operated a cluster in production.
- CI/CD: GitLab CI and GitHub Actions, OIDC and short-lived credentials in preference to keys.
- Secrets management in general, which is the thread running through most of what I write.
Teaching
I have been an AWS Authorized Instructor (AAI) for six years: official AWS courses, plus several years teaching DevOps, cloud and security in university.
I was a technical reviewer on three Packt books:
- HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (003) Exam Guide
- AWS Certified Developer – Associate Certification and Beyond
- HashiCorp Infrastructure Automation Certification Guide
Talks and videos
- HashiTalks 2021: Secure Your Terraform Deploys in GitLab-CI with HashiCorp Vault, on HashiCorp’s channel. The written version is the two-part series here: the pipeline side and the application side.
- Cloud Ouest 2020: Be secret like a ninja with HashiCorp Vault, thirty minutes, in French.
- Pass the SALT 2019: the recording, which is also embedded in the three-part Vault migration series here.
- HashiDays Amsterdam 2018: A Way to Share Secrets in Your Pipeline, on HashiCorp’s channel.
- Tuto de Revolve - Hashicorp Vault, a tutorial series in French on the Devoteam Revolve channel.
Upcoming talks and the events I speak at are on Sessionize.
Community
- HashiCorp Ambassador from 2020 to 2025.
- AWS Community Builder, 2024.
- Co-organiser of the francophone HashiCorp User Group (HUG) for eight years.
- My certifications are on Credly.
- Regular at HashiCorp events, which I write up here: HashiConf 2020, HashiDays Paris 2023 and HashiConf Boston 2024.
This blog
Articles in English and in French, on what I run into at work rather than on what makes a tidy demo. Most come with a repository you can run yourself. The whole archive is on the blog and there is an RSS feed.
The site itself is a Hugo static site on AWS, deployed with Terraform, which is of course one of the things I have written about.