Cloud ⛅️

Yesterday the following email dropped into my inbox … … I spend a lot of the day job looking at and talking about Amazon Web Services (AWS) so this had got my interest. In my last book↗ I covered Amazon’s Elastic Container Service (ECS) and I have to admit that it wasn’t the most greatest service Amazon had released, especially compared the ease you can now launch Swarm Clusters using Docker. ...

A while I posted about a script I wrote to quickly bootstrap a Digital Ocean droplet. One one of the things I noticed while trying to install a few packages is that even though my script had run a yum update I was booting into the original Kernel and this was causing all sorts of hilarity when trying to build a Kernel module, because of this I added a few lines to my script to tell you if the kernel has been updated, and if so what the new version is; ...

As regular readers will know I really like the tools provided by Hashicorp↗ and today I found an excuse to use one. I needed to bring up a Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure↗ . I hadn’t logged into Azure for quite a while so imagine my shock when I opened the dashboard, it’s not that great and the beta of the new one isn’t that brilliant either. It was so bad I tweeted about it …. ...

Last night I did some I haven’t done for a while and watched the opening episode of a new Dragons Den↗ series while it was being aired. After a short time I found myself less interested in what was happening on screen and more interested in what was happening to the contestants (this is after all a primetime game show isn’t it?) websites during what should be a predicted spike in traffic. ...

As I have mentioned a few times on this blog I tend to use DigtialOcean↗ to spin up servers for testing and to host some of my projects. I also still use CentOS 7 as my preferred OS. Each time I boot a droplet I run few a couple of tasks to get the server how I prefer it. Run a yum update Enable swap Install & configure Fail2Ban Enable firewalld Install vim-enhanced, deltarpm & enable EPEL↗ As I am lazy and sometimes re-launch instances several times when working on a project I decided to write a quick script to do the above so I don’t have to↗ . ...

I am currently using most of these tools day to day … Desktop Apps SublimeText↗ — Still the best text editor around Dashline↗ — Cross device password manager Desk↗ — Great editor for writting blog posts Photoshop↗ — For ermmmmm Photos OmniGraffle↗ — For diagrams and stuff Reeder 2↗ — For reading all the feeds GitHub Mac Client↗ — The Mac GitHub client Commandline Apps Home Brew↗ — Install “missing” stuff on macs Cask↗ — Install Mac Apps using the command line using Brew StormSSH↗ — Key & hosts management known_hosts↗ — A simple cli known hosts manager Packer↗ — Build machine images Z↗ — Jump around the CLI Vagrant↗ — Run machines built with Packer Services Digital Ocean↗ — Server Hosting AWS↗ — Server Hosting CloudFlare↗ — CDN & Stuff Github↗ — Code Hosting Pinboard↗ — Bookmarks Evernote↗ — Note taking RememberTheMilk↗ — Task management Feedly↗ — For managing all the newsfeeds Pocket↗ — For reading articles later Toggl↗ — Time tracking Authy↗ — A nice Two Factor Authentication tool Plex↗ — An impressive cross device media centre … so not much in the way of changes since I last wrote about the tools I use. ...

I noticed yesterday that my DigitalOcean monthly spend was a little more than I was expecting, turns out I have launched the wrong instance size when I last rebuilt my machine, so to save myself a few dollars a month I migrated the instance to a fresh server with a lower spec. By default DigitalOcean servers do not come with swap↗ enabled, because of this you run the risk of oomkiller↗ killing processes to try and keep the server accessible. Luckily as all DigitalOcean servers are SSD backed and come with a decent amount of disk space so enabling swap isn’t an issue; ...

As someone who deals with the word “Cloud” as part of their day job it can get very confusing. When a client or colleague says “I want cloud” or “what about hosting it in the cloud” what does it mean? Well, in my line of work it could mean any of the following …. Virtual Machines hosted on a highly available hardware platform Instances hosted in a an auto-scaling available configuration Using Content Delivery Networks (CDN) for content Uploading static content Distributed Object Storage Software as a Service (SaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) Thats only a small list of what services which the word “Cloud” is used for. What makes things even more confusing is when I try and explain to friends and family what actually I do their only points of reference for “Cloud” are advertisements like this one from IBM …. ...