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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. …
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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. …
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Dockerized Postgresql Development Environment
2015-03-24
My local development environment is kind of a mess. I am running OSX and use a variety of techniques to run the projects I work on. For example, I have local postgresql, redis, and memcache servers running to support some projects. Every once in a while I run into issues where a version of the service I am running for one project is not compatible with the version I need on another project. This problem can be solved with virtualized, per-project development environments using a tool like Vagrant. …
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Securing a Server with Ansible
2015-02-27
A while back, Bryan Kennedy wrote a post describing how he spends the first 5 minutes configuring and securing a new linux server. He runs through the list of commands and configuration settings that address things like: …
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How to Convince your Boss to Invest in Continuous Delivery
2015-01-19
If you are a developer, you might already be aware of the benefits of continuous delivery. This can be frustrating if your management is not also on board. They might not see it as a worthy investment at this point. Maybe they feel your team is too busy fighting fires. Or there are important features to ship and taking time to develop a continuous delivery workflow would take away from that. Perhaps they have decided that an infrequent deploy schedule is best for your application. …
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Ensuring a Command Module Task is Repeatable with Ansible
2014-11-22
A few readers have pointed out to me that there is a small improvement I could make to the simple Ansible playbook I created for my Ansible Quick Start post. Idempotence is an important concept in Ansible and the last task in the playbook was violating that principle. …
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11 Capistrano Plugins To Simplify Your Rails Deployments
2014-10-12
The Rails deployment story has improved dramatically since the early days, but it can still be challenging. Compiling assets, running migrations, achieving zero-downtime deployments, and load balancing your application servers are some of the tasks that you’ll want to handle as part of your deployment strategy. Many deployment processes still tend to be a mixture of automation and manual work. The goal is to have a fully automated, repeatable and fast deployment process. Sounds simple on paper, but as many of us already know, this process is time consuming, error prone and has the tendency to make you want to rip your hair out or throw your keyboard out the window. …
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Ansible Quick Start - A Brief Introduction
2014-09-26
Recently, I have been working with Ansible, an IT automation, configuration management and provisioning tool along the same lines as Chef and Puppet. If you are responsible for managing servers - even if it is just one - you would be well served to learn one of these tools. …