We spent a good chunk of late May 2025 building a short course on Nmap from scratch - 12 lectures, 12 companion labs, plus the entire virtual lab infrastructure the students would use to run the labs. The whole thing lives on our wiki under Nmap/Short Course.

This post is not about the Nmap material itself (that comes in the next post). It is about the design decisions behind the course - why 12 lectures, why a fully isolated cloud lab, why Vagrant + Docker + Ansible instead of picking one, and what we would do differently if we started over.

Course Shape …

Overview

This post covers a technique for mocking AWS in unit tests so that you can test functionality that normally requires API calls and handling responses, by mocking those responses instead of making actual API calls.

A Simple Example: Mocking API Responses

The Genuine AWS Call

Let's start with an example of an AWS API call. Here's how our program will be structured: start with a driver lister.py that …

These notes are also available on git.charlesreid1.com here or in https://git.charlesreid1.com/charlesreid1/aws.

AWSome Day Notes: Part 2: Networking, Security, and Miscellany

Following are some notes from Amazon's AWSome Day (Tuesday, February 27, 2018).

Nomenclature

Elastic: You'll see the word "elastic" on a lot of Amazon's services. The "elastic" concept refers to a service that is able to handle huge increases in traffic (Pokemon Go - number of users grew orders of magnitude faster/larger than what they designed for).

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): The AWS equivalent of a virtual private network (VPN). A VPC is …

These notes are also available on git.charlesreid1.com here or in https://git.charlesreid1.com/charlesreid1/aws.

AWSome Day Notes: Part 1: The Basics

Following are some notes from Amazon's AWSome Day (Tuesday, February 27, 2018).

EC2 Costs and Scheduling

Cost of a node:

• Important to understand Amazon's price model: users pay for access, not for hardware
• Cost of AWS node is cost for on the spot access

Scheduling:

• If you can anticipate your usage, you can schedule instances in advance, and get a discount
• Discount of 50% for one-year reservation (if you keep it busy for 6 months …