Bare Metal Cyber

Cloud promises agility, savings, and simplicity, but for many organizations it has quietly become a walled garden with only one gate. In this audio edition of “Platform Captivity: Life Inside a Single Cloud’s Walled Garden,” we walk through how “all in” decisions on a single provider turn into deep architectural, commercial, and regulatory dependencies. You will hear how comfort and standardization evolve into structural lock-in, and why platform captivity should be treated as its own risk domain, not just a technical complaint. This narration is based on my Wednesday “Headline” feature from Bare Metal Cyber Magazine.
 
We then move through the key decision points leaders face: the lure of integrated native services, the difference between decorative multi-cloud and real strategic options, and what it means to negotiate from inside the fence. Along the way, we explore practical ways to recover leverage without launching an unrealistic great escape project, and how to design new systems with exit in mind from day one. If you are responsible for cloud strategy, resilience, or security, this episode will help you see where your organization is truly benefiting from focus and where it is quietly giving away future freedom.

When secrets leak into source code, they rarely announce themselves with flashing lights. In this audio companion to Bare Metal Cyber’s Tuesday “Insights” feature, we walk through what “secrets in source code” really means for working teams: the keys, tokens, passwords, and other sensitive values that quietly end up in repositories and stick around for years. You will hear where these secrets tend to hide in real environments, how they move through developer laptops, branches, and pipelines, and where secret scanning and better handling practices actually fit into your existing stack.
 
The episode then turns to day-to-day use: how secret scanning flows through CI/CD pipelines and code reviews, what realistic quick wins look like for smaller teams, and how more mature programs tie scanning into central secrets management and ownership. Along the way, we unpack the benefits, trade-offs, and limits of these approaches, and spend time on the failure modes and healthy signals that show whether your efforts are really working. The narration is based on the Tuesday “Insights” feature from Bare Metal Cyber Magazine, adapted into a clear, story-driven walkthrough you can listen to on the go.

CompTIA Cloud+ (Cloud+) is built for people who already know their way around servers, networks, and virtualization, and are now being asked to make it all work in the cloud. In this episode, we walk through what Cloud+ really covers, who benefits most from it, and how it helps you handle real hybrid and multi-cloud environments instead of just one vendor’s platform. The narration is based on my Monday “Certified” feature from Bare Metal Cyber Magazine, so you get the same structured breakdown in an easy, listenable format.
 
You will hear how the exam is organized, what kinds of scenarios and decisions it emphasizes, and why it rewards applied understanding more than pure memorization. We also explore how Cloud+ fits into a broader certification path, how hiring managers tend to read it on a résumé, and where it can open doors in infrastructure and cloud engineering roles. If you want to go deeper after this episode, you can keep building your skills with the full Cloud+ audio course inside the Bare Metal Cyber Audio Academy.

In this audio edition of “Machine Identity Riot: Certificates, Tokens, and Bots Gone Wild,” we walk leaders through the trust fabric that actually runs their business. You will hear how certificates, tokens, API keys, service accounts, and bots have quietly become the dominant identity layer in most organizations, far outnumbering human users. The episode explains where this machine identity surface comes from, how it is stitched together across PKI, identity providers, cloud platforms, and automation tools, and why it has become such a powerful driver of both outages and attacker leverage.
 
From there, the narration moves through the key sections of the Headline article: the common failure modes that accumulate risk without constant explosions, the shift to lifecycle thinking for issuance, rotation, and revocation, and the case for running machine identity as a shared platform instead of a series of one-off projects. It also looks ahead to AI agents, software supply chain signing, and edge deployments, showing how today’s decisions about authorities, key lifetimes, and automation interfaces will either calm or fuel the next machine identity riot. This episode is based on the Wednesday “Headline” feature from Bare Metal Cyber Magazine.

This narrated episode explores DevSecOps in CI/CD pipelines as a practical way to build security into the same paths your code already takes from commit to production. You’ll hear what DevSecOps in CI/CD pipelines really means, where it fits in modern delivery stacks, and how security checks can live alongside familiar build, test, and deploy stages. The episode walks through the flow of a typical change, showing how tools, pipelines, and people work together to catch issues earlier without turning every release into a negotiation.
 
We also dig into everyday use cases and patterns, from simple “shift-left” hygiene checks on pull requests to more advanced policy-as-code and standardized secure pipeline templates. Along the way, the episode unpacks key benefits, the trade-offs between speed and safety, and the failure modes that make DevSecOps feel like empty buzzwords when it is not done well. This audio is developed by Bare Metal Cyber and is based on my Tuesday “Insights” feature in Bare Metal Cyber Magazine, so you get a clear, vendor-neutral view designed for real-world teams.