Insights and reflections on our Cloud journey
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ACP Engineering achieve Partner of the Year - Rising Star
ACP Engineering has been awarded the AWS Rising Star Consulting Partner award in recognition of its exceptional growth and contributions as an AWS Advanced Partner, with over 7 years as an AWS APN Partner and 150+ successfully delivered projects ACP Engineering has established itself as a leading cloud solutions provider in Switzerland.
ACP Engineering and Edeltech join Waterscope in Valais, Switzerland on an IoT Water testing workshop
Water is super important! as a raw asset to all of us, our life rotates around it and our accessibility to access it in a clean, safe way is equally as important. That said, clean drinking water is part of this. Here we learn about a project we are building up together with Edeltech and Waterscope, on how we can enable the productization of their water testing solution for the Swiss utility market. How did we come about this project? As the technology is built on ARM and Cloud. One of our colle
Security is complicated! Or is it actually?
Yeah, that’s a catchy title, I know. For sure, security is important and complicated. But there are ways to make it easier to apply with less pain. In the last months, I helped a customer to set up and automate CIS compliant infrastructure on AWS. Eliminating much of the manual work and complexity involved with CIS compliance. I come, like most of you, from a world where you learned so many times how painful security can be. So I had my reservations when I started working on this project. But I
How is Mobile Tech making it's way in the Laptop?
In this post we talk about why Apple Macbook M1, MacMini and laptop hardware is moving "Back to ARM" > OSX => aarch64 (arm-on-arm) The reality of "arm-on-arm developer" just became a whole lot more serious, if it wasn't already: Apple's move BigSur, to somewhat back to RISC is a big one, not big in the sence of streamlining there software stack on ARM, because they already do with iPhone etc... But now taking ARM on the laptop and workstation is a whole another game, as many of us know these t
Snowpiercer - The Cloud Transformation Train
A recent TV series over on Netflix and TNT, that is hot in the media recently has a very clear underlining story of change and survival. We don't ramble too much about transformation topics as change is constant and inevitable, it's a question of who's pushing or pulling, what teams are onboard, and who's driving the engine. At 56K we are very busy being just that, "the engineers". (Don't worry.. no spoiler here) But how is this related to Snowpiercer; the social and political story that rotat
Use Case - Kanton Zug GIS
Learn how ACP Engineering enabled Zugmap.ch to adopt cloud technology and host on Exoscale - Swiss Cloud Provider. We share a Q/A and Webinar. Since when has ACP Engineering offered the Exoscale cloud hosting platform? ACP Engineering has offered Exoscale services since 2018. Even before we started offering Exoscale as an offering ACP Engineering used and still uses internally Exoscale to power our VPN’s and other internal services. As a specialist in cloud operations, what does ACP Engineering particularly appreciate a
Deploy Grafana using Docker, AWS ECS and Terraform
Grafana's ability to run in Docker containers and easily connect to AWS Cloudwatch to grab metrics and logs makes it an ideal candidate for your AWS infrastructure monitoring needs. At ACP Engineering, we usually deploy it as a replacement for the Cloudwatch interface as we are fans of Grafana's powerful features and look. The easiness with which it can be run "serverless" and its deployment automated with Terraform transformed it into a standard piece of our recommended infrastructure. Before we g
Arm DevSummit 2020 - just around the corner; Parsec, Cilium and Docker
In just under two weeks, on 6th-8th October 2020, Arm DevSummit 2020 (formally known as Arm TechCon) will be running a three-day, fully online, virtual event. Check out this array of awesome topics, across these 8 tracks - AI in the Real World: From Development to Deployment - Building the Internet of things - Chip Design Methodology - Cloud Native Developer Experience - Creating the Next Generation of Interactive Experiences - Infrastructure of Modern Computing - Tech for Global Goals - The Jou
In 20min flat! VMware on Equinix Metal deployed /w Terraform (and watching rugby!)
(Packet.net is now Equinix Metal (https://metal.equinix.com/) Earlier this year we had a workshop with a customer, they where a "very on-prem/in-house setup", They where thinking "Hybrid-Cloud" but wanted to see what Terrafrom was capable of and it's limitations well lets see ;). However no reason why it's not limited to the big 3 public cloud providers (AWS, Azure and GCP). On the 1st February 2020 I had to stay up late to watch the Six Nations live Ireland vs Scotland, so spent the time hacki
Innovation in Banking, St. Gallen - Apéro (18.03.2020)
On the 18th March 2019 at the Hotel Einstein we will co-host together with Amazon Web Services Switzerland an evening in cover Banking in the Cloud. This is a co-hosted event with Docker Switzerland Meetup Group as a special event in St. Gallen about how the finance and bank
Year 2020 at ACP Engineering
We are happy to close off 2019 with an exciting year for 56K, partners and our customers, after reaching great milestones we are happy to kick-off the next decade with a few exciting 2020 goals! Highlights * Launch the new ACP Engineering website and Brand! (blog [http://https://blog.56k.cloud/branding-a-tech-company-to-non-tech/]) * Grow the Team, Expand our Presence * Community Outreach, Training, and Workshops
DockerCon 2018 Barcelona Preview
DockerCon returns to Barcelona after first appearing in the beautiful city back in 2015. A lot has transpired with Docker and the industry since we were last in Barcelona. The community continues to grow, containers have now become the standard when building Cloud Native applications, and now Kubernetes is part of almost every discussion when talking about Orchestration.
Bootstrapping a Family Friendly Technology Company
ack in January this year, Darragh and I launched our startup “ACP Engineering”. Darragh and I took time to write down our core values which were both from a company perspective and our experiences important to us and our families, as both of us, are married with kids.
Experts Live Switzerland 2018
I had the pleasure of working with the head of Experts Live conferences Marcel Zehner when he reached out to interview me for the X-Talk video series. After we recorded the video Marcel introduced me to Experts Live Switzerland and asked if I would be interested to present Docker.
Transforming Infrastructure Analysis: How We Built a Terraform Advisor Powered by AI Agents and Video-Based Memory
Terraform Advisor by 56k.Cloud introduces a revolutionary approach to infrastructure analysis using multi-agent AI collaboration. Instead of generating generic recommendations, the system answers specific infrastructure questions by combining real-time Terraform codebase analysis with AWS Well-Architected Framework guidance. Three specialized AI agents work autonomously—one analyzes your GitHub repository, another searches AWS documentation using innovative video-based memory technology (Memvid), and a third synthesizes insights into actionable answers. The model-agnostic architecture supports any AI provider and works with any Terraform repository, making it a flexible, cutting-edge solution for modern infrastructure teams seeking evidence-based answers to their specific infrastructure concerns.
56k.Cloud joins ACP's international IT platform
Swiss cloud specialist 56k.Cloud has joined ACP Group's international IT platform, forging a strategic alliance that significantly enhances AWS cloud expertise, AI innovation, and digital transformation capabilities across the DACH region.
Developing a Serverless Generative AI Knowledge Base App on AWS
My diploma project developing a Generative AI app on AWS, which forms a knowledge base from user documents and responds to natural language queries. Infrastructure as Code principles and AWS services were utilized for a scalable, cost-effective architecture.
A Day to Remember at AWS Cloud Day Zürich
For the third consecutive year, our team graced the grounds of the AWS annual extravaganza in Zurich. This year, we stepped up as a gold sponsor, occupying a grander booth. And, the results? Absolutely rewarding! With a footfall surpassing 1,800 attendees, our booth buzzed with energy and engagement throughout the day.
Parsec support for AWS IoT Greengrass Nuclean - ARM and 56K Demo @ AWS Re:Invent 2021!
One of our most recent IoT projects has been with AWS and ARM, to enable ParSec support in Greengrass, If you remember Parsec? It's one of the CNCF projects ACP Engineering work actively on building content and training, but in this project, we helped implement a Java Client en and used that java implementation in AWS Greengrass Lets take a look at what AWS Greengrass Nucleaes v2 is all about There were a few activities that lead up to this, for starters with ARM team we wanted to demonstrate PARSEC
Bringing 5G to Developers: ACP Engineering will be present at #MWC21 - #CLOUDCITY!
It's real, it's happening in-person and at Barcelona this year! The ACP Engineering team will be present together with TelcoDR at Mobile World Congress 2021! This happens, First as real event and Second as a virtual event! 56K will exhibit at #CLOUDCITY Booth hosted by TelcoDR! > 70% of our communication is physical, visual and feeling related So why are we attending MWC21? Why In-Person? Why physically? After nearly 1.5 years working with little or no physical presence with customers and partners i
What's the Difference: AWS Outpost, Wavelength, Snowball Edge?
As most of us for a while know that AWS is one of the 3 HyperScalers of global public cloud vendor offing a Edge Solution. But much more, this post looks at three services that allow you to run AWS hardware on the edge, on-premise, managed in various co-locations, or any combination. We also will look at the recently launched ECS / EKS Anywhere offering which enables AWS managed containers at the edge. You can gain a majority of the AWS cloud benefits already today but at the edge. We'll look at
ACP Engineering Update: Brian is Stepping Down
It's incredible to think that ACP Engineering is celebrating its third birthday. Three years ago, Darragh and I boarded a train from Zurich, Switzerland direction of Austria for our first customer project as ACP Engineering. This trip marked our first customer project. We were still finalizing the company registration, setting up accounting, and generally just getting setup, but that didn't stop us from boarding the train and getting started. Brian & Darragh first project as ACP Engineering - 2017In late 2017 th
PARSEC - A Cloud Native Security Framework across Edge, Cloud and IoT
(co-authored together with – Marc Meunier, Sr, Manager Ecosystem Development, Infrastructure Arm and Darragh Grealish, Cloud Engineer and Co-Founder of ACP Engineering) Earlier this month, Marc and I hosted a talk at the CNCF where we introduced PARSEC, the security abstraction project for Edge. During the talk, we demonstrated a use case that showcased the developer experience spanning 5G, IoT and Edge Cloud. In this blog post we will dig a bit deeper into the design and provide some additional ba
Sales Accelerator - Winning deals with TheSalesPlaybook.io
Sales and BizDev is vast topic, but well defined business in itself. Something the we had no real talent and experience in. After some moonlighting various business sales meetups (when you could do that) we came across Manual Hartmann. He recently setup a new startup "thesalesplaybook.io"
Swiss IT Reseller - ACP Engineering mentioned in Swiss Newsletter
ACP Engineering received a mention in the Swiss IT Reseller - HyperScale [https://www.itreseller.ch/] newsletter. Just as we close off June 2020, we'd like to share a short text from a recent publication where ACP Engineering was recognised in DACH by its partnership with AWS. Since 2018 we have been working actively with Amazon Web Services Switzerland on various global and local projects (Edeltech migration from Heroku to AWS [https://blog.56k.cloud/magicbook-migration-from-heroku-to-aws/], Hosting AWS Ou
Deploying a Gitlab Runner on AWS with Packer
Introduction Gitlab.com allows its users to run their own, self-hosted, Gitlab Runners as part of their Gitlab CI feature. This comes in handy when the CI jobs have to run in a user-owned environment or more powerful runners are needed. If that environment is AWS and you are looking for an automated way of setting up the Runner(s) on EC2, then stay tuned for an ACP Engineering recipe!
Deploying static sites with GitHub Actions and Netlify
...and a hack to turn that PHP site into a static one Background For the last few months, we have been in a rebranding process here at ACP Engineering, that included a brand-new website developed by the awesome team at Twotwentytwo [http://twotwentytwo.se/]. The finished product that we have received from them was a site developed in Php with some Node.js built assets. But internally we decided that we really want a st
ACP Engineering at AWS Swiss Cloud Day (29.09.2019)
Join us on 29th September for the AWS Swiss Cloud Day in Oerlikon, Zurich. We will be present there with many other AWS Partners. To sign-up and collect a surprise gift at our booth, drop your details here and we would be happy to welcome you to our booth! Looking forward to meeting you there. (Impression from AWS Zurich Summit 2019)
How open source helped me get a good job
In 2006, in order to get my degree, I had to write a thesis about MPLS networks. I was waiting for servers (racks) to arrive so I could test my code and while waiting, I was looking for a way to test locally patched Linux kernel modules.
Put the Brakes on Docker Containers
Deploying new containers has become ridiculously easy (In a good way). Once containers are running, it is even easier to scale. Doubling or even tripling the number of running containers can occur with a simple keystroke but can your container infrastructure handle it? Much like cars driving on a freeway. All the cars have different shapes, sizes, and performance. Cars are limited to the capacity of the road. Fre
Presence at AWS 2025 Summit Zurich
Just over a week since the AWS Zurich Summit 2025, I’m happy to share we had another interesting year of attendance and this year also content to present, including our quick spotlight presentation on “Cloud Foundation” focusing on rapid landing zone deployments, private networking and demoing the latest work with our customers from AI to connectivity.
Cloud-Native IoT Reference Architecture with ARM SystemReady
Cloud-Native IoT Reference Architecture with Arm SystemReady is an open-source project developed as part of a master's thesis to meet the challenges of integrating embedded systems with the cloud. This architecture facilitates the automatic provisioning of a cloud infrastructure and the integration of an embedded system during its initial start-up.
ACP Engineering on AWS Booth - Embedded World 2024
From 9th till 11th april - ACP Engineering together with Eurotech where featured on the AWS booth, throughout the 3 day congress we could demonstrate the work we've been doing over the years securing AWS Greengrass and Sitewise on Edge gateways such as the Eurotech Religengate 10-14,
CDK: Certificate Handling with Custom Resources
In a recent project, we helped our customer to migrate the websites of all their customers to AWS. It was clear from the beginning to use the concept of Infrastructure as Code. Yet, it wasn't so clear, which tool to use. After some evaluation, we decided to use CDK with Typescript. This played into their existing stack. As they already use Typescript for the websites and other toolings. The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is the Infrastructure of Code (IaC) solution from AWS. With this solu
SocratesCH - First post-COVID in-person event /w ACP Engineering
After a two-year wait, and anxiety around COVID. The 56K Team was able to finally attend an in-person event it sponsored along with AWS, House of Test et.. After a great turn, with almost 50 developers across Switzerland and abroad that joined for 3 packed days of sessions above in the Swiss Alps. We are happy to share with you a short look at the sessions contributed by the 56K team This is the 5th Installment of SocratesCH event which we happy co-organization along with 42Talents and myself (
Building Docker Multi-Arch Images with GitLab CI/CD
In one project I was working on, we migrated a Ruby on Rails application to the AWS Elastic Container Service. In this project, we used AWS Graviton2. AWS's own silicon is based on the ARM Neoverse cores (Alpine ALC12B00) 64-bit ARM processor. After that decision, we looked at the entire stack to see which tools we needed to adapt. One tool that we use for the building and deployment process is a container base image. This image was not yet ready to run on the AWS Graviton processor architecture
ACP Engineering moves to Technopark Winterthur
At the beginning of this year we moved our office (yes believer it or not, we have had an office). Why we moved and why we keep a central point and purpose of having a "brick and mortar" location we will share in this blog post. For the last 3 years we've been located in a number of Regus/Spaces office, for both the location and corporate co-working model. That served us well and you can read more about it in a previous blog post => Why the move? But as our cloud work evolved more and more t
AWS Outpost Deep-Dive with ACP Engineering
This year, we wrote about hosting AWS Outpost and the interfaces in a Swiss Datacenter context. One of the key topics we showed was "Connectivity Hub." Having Outpost located in a connectivity heavy data center enables customers to reduce the effort to bring these interfaces into the cloud while keeping the ultra-low latency gained by having a local presence. In this blog post, we will dig deeper into how that works, why Outpost brings these advantages, and reduce overall operational costs. AWS
AWS Committed to Swiss Region in 2022 - ch-central-1 or eu-central-2 ?
With the recent announcement of a AWS Swiss Region physically located in Switzerland, the country known for chocolate and cheese will in the next two years be able to offer up to 3 availability zones in the next two years, along with the huge range of AWS services we are all familiar with. From what we know, the new region will be build in the east of the country where the majority of Swiss data centers are located. AWS joins the two other Hyper-scalers: Google and Microsoft in their commitment
What is the Joint Innovation Center for 5G?
Recently the ACP Engineering Team visited a 5G Lab, and 5G showcase centre in Zurich, Switzerland. Where there is huge potential for #5G, #IoT and #EdgeCloud applications!. Learn more about ACP Engineering recent efforts in bring new edge application development.
How to Develop inside a Container using Visual Studio Code Remote Containers
The Visual Studio Remote-Containers extension lets you attach VS Code to running containers as if it was running locally on the environment, allowing you to quickly peak and continue development inside running containers.
Hosting AWS Outpost for you
Do you need AWS services locally in Switzerland? Together with AWS we are offering a Managed AWS Outpost deployment(s) with direct connectivity back to an AWS Region (currently Frankfurt, eu-central-1, soon Ireland). What does AWS outpost provide? As many companies and ISV's various requirements to host their own infrastructure, much of that cost is not directly related to the core business of the company and its customers. Also the knowledge to run such a complex deployment becomes a burden. A
Business Continuity Plan for COVID-19
We at ACP Engineering, a remote focused and distributed company, have implemented the following objectives and responsibilities which support our COVID-19 continuity plan. We are sharing this information as part of a broader effort to ensure business continuity during this time in the hope that our plan can benefit others and how the tools and processes we use enable our team, customers, and partners. Our top priority is the safety and health of our employees, customers, and partners. As our employe
Branding a Tech Company to non-Tech
Why we branded ACP Engineering On the same train, going the same direction, aligning teams is key to a successful cloud journeyInitially we didn’t have a logo, I drew up something with a black background that was enough for daily business, having been involved in branding in the past and understanding the value and purpose of it. At the time, we didn’t need a strong public presence. In the early days of 56K, we were sha
ACP Engineering year in Review and goals for 2019
Wow, one year had come and gone before we realized it. We established ACP Engineering one year ago December 2018. It has been one heck of a year with amazing achievements considering we started with zero revenue, customers, or projects.
Trigger Docker builds with an AWS IoT Button
Not long ago GitHub and AWS together cross promoted a blog post about triggering new releases in GitHub by pressing an AWS IoT button. This new process got me thinking about how we can use an AWS IoT button together with Docker.
Provisioning Grafana Datasources and Dashboards Automagically
Grafana released v5.0 at GrafanaCon last week. It is a significant update packed with mouth-watering features. I’ve been testing the beta for quite some time and was very impressed with the maturity already in Beta. Most people will notice the New Dashboard Engine, UX, and themes as prominent visual updates. However, down the list of features which to be honest, I missed the first few times reading the release no
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