aws

Automatic DNS for Kubernetes Ingresses with ExternalDNS

2017-05-01

ExternalDNS is a relatively new Kubernetes Incubator project that makes Ingresses and Services available via DNS. It currently supports AWS Route 53 and Google Cloud DNS. There are several similar tools available with varying features and capabilities like route53-kubernetes, Mate, and the DNS controller from Kops. While it is not there yet, the goal is for ExternalDNS to include all of the functionality of the other options by 1.0. In this post, we will use ExternalDNS to automatically create DNS records for Ingress resources on AWS.…

Deploy Kubernetes in an Existing AWS VPC with Kops and Terraform

2017-03-05

Kops is a relatively new tool that can be used to deploy production-ready Kubernetes clusters on AWS. It has the ability to create a highly-available cluster spanning multiple availability zones and supports a private networking topology. By default, Kops will create all of the required resources on AWS for you — the EC2 instances, the VPC and subnets, the required DNS entries in Route53, the load balancers for exposing the Kubernetes API, and all of the other necessary infrastructure components. For organizations that use Terraform, Kops can instead be used to generate a Terraform configuration for all of the aforementioned AWS resources. This will allow them to use the familiar terraform plan and terraform apply workflow to build and update their Kubernetes infrastructure. The Terraform configuration that Kops generates will include new VPC, subnet, and route resources. But what if you want to use Kops to generate a Terraform configuration for a Kubernetes cluster in an existing VPC? In this post, I will walk through the process to achieve this. …

Building a Kubernetes Cluster on AWS

2016-03-13

The excellent Kubernetes documentation includes a guide that covers how to build and run a Kubernetes cluster on AWS with the kube-up script. However, when it comes to customizing that install, the details are a little sparse. In this post, I am going to go over just one way you can customize the cluster. Hopefully, this will provide a little more transparency about what is going on under the hood and give you a little more control over how your cluster is built.…

Introducing AWS Keymaster

2015-10-18

AWS Keymaster is a simple utility that allows you to import your own personal key pair into all AWS regions with a single command. Distributed as a single binary with no dependencies, AWS Keymaster is easy to deploy and run. It is also available as a Docker image. …

Waiting on EC2 Resources

2015-10-11

When using the AWS CLI, did you know you could run a command that waits for a specific resource or condition to occur before moving on to the next? For example, you might want to write a script that starts an EC2 instance and then, only after it is up and running, perform an additional task. Without the aws ec2 wait command, this could be a bit of a challenge involving a loop and some polling for the state. However, this is actually kind of trivial with the wait command at our disposal. …

AWS CloudFormation vs Terraform

2015-10-03

I am a firm believer in the benefits of programmable and repeatable infrastructure for organizations of all sizes. There are a wide range of tools that are available to help you along this path but I just want to touch on two of them today: CloudFormation and Terraform. …

Troubleshooting AWS Elastic Beanstalk Errors

2015-05-02

When errors occur in your Elastic Beanstalk environment, the root cause may not always be obvious. In the browser, you may get a 502 Bad Gateway error or an error like: An unhandled lowlevel error occured. The application logs may have details. Not very helpful. …

CloudFront with an S3 Origin

2014-11-10

In a previous post, I covered how to setup CloudFront as an asset host for a Rails application using the same site as the origin. It is also possible to use an S3 bucket as the origin. The easiest way I know of to make this work with Rails is to use the asset_sync gem. …

Web Fonts with CloudFront

2014-11-09

In my last post, I may have been a little cavalier when I said it is a “no-brainer” to use CloudFront to serve assets for your Rails application. In truth, there are a few issues that can make things more complicated. One of those is the ability to serve web fonts. …

Using CloudFront to Speed up your Rails Application

2014-11-06

Update: November 9, 2014. A few people asked me how to handle serving web fonts using CloudFront. I created a new post here that covers a few options. Moving your static assets (images, css, javascripts, etc.) to a Content Delivery Network is a quick, easy, and impactful win for the performance of your Rails application. CDNs are designed to distribute your content to multiple geographic locations and to serve it up to your users in the most optimal way possible. Using a CDN also lets you reduce the number of requests your web servers need to handle. This is especially important when you are hosted on platform like Heroku. …