Just another geek
Totally unfamiliar territory for me. I have a Maven install unpacked. How to get Jenkins to see it? Answer: go to Global Tool Configuration, and set your Maven installation to *not* install automatically, then set MVN_HOME to where your install is. Simple!
The day after the vote when the result was revealed, my reaction was incandescent and aghast. How could 52% of the people who voted be so daft? Turns out it’s a common delusion. My acceptance speech as leader of an independent political party:
“My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen,
We are now in the privileged position of having got rid of the Tories and their austerity agenda and are now in a position to move this country forward again. BTW, The word Tory derives from the Middle Irish word tóraidhe; modern Irish tóraí; modern Scottish Gaelic Tòraidh: outlaw, robber or brigand, from the Irish word tóir, meaning “pursuit”, since outlaws were “pursued men”.
David Cameron’s ill-advised referendum to save the Tory party disenfranchised 48% of the population, and in the subsequent years and we have since been fed a steady stream of lies by leaver politicians and press.
Unlike the squirrels in leavers heads, I treasure the pillars of being in the EU. I like having free trade with 27 other countries. I like that the Good Friday agreement, which ended what was, in other words, a civil war, is enshrined in an open border. Northern Ireland has come on in leaps and bounds. My neighbour will probably go back to Switzerland or Germany if the university research funding dries up.
The bullshit about the “unelected beaureaucrats” is exactly that. We elect MPs to the European parliament and we get a veto over any legislation. We have rejected remarkably little.
I like the fact my human rights are enshrined by law. The Tories in their Brexit panic threatened to do away with it.
I waited in vain for the £350 million a week for the NHS. The Tory promises of more police or more money for the NHS doesn’t even make a dent in the damage done by ten years of austerity. Turkey was never going to join the EU, more’s the pity.
If you Google “leaver lies” you’ll find plenty of collated lists. If an unworkable Brexit had gone through, I’d have been off to Asia.
So anyhow, here’s to a future of being part of one of the largest free trade areas in the world, Schengen and the Euro.”
So this is all about getting started with AWS. I’ve been using AWS tangentially for about five years, almost always EC2 instances, so not really pushing the envelope. I’d really like to get my head round serverless and lambdas but I’m having a bit of a conceptual problem trying to work out a use case to do at home.
I have done the Udemy “AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Exam” which was quite frankly brutal, demanding 90% for three papers. First time through each I got 70-80% which I thought wasn’t too shabby but obviously not good enough for their arbitrary cutoff. The second time through I got >90% which was nice.
The biggest takeaway I have is once you’ve created a root account, create a user account and only give it only the privileges it needs. Security you know!
This is the list of white papers I’ve ingested to far. I hope it proves useful.
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-overview.pdf
This is the motherlode. If you want an overview of all available services on AWS, this is the place to start. For us in the
This takes the overview one step further. Apparently as you partition your app vertically, VPSs are the trick. Security again.
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS_Well-Architected_Framework.pdf
In a good chunk of the contracts I’ve done, the developers have been good boys and written tests, but there was no way of automatically running them. Jenkins fixes this. Better still using the Perl TAP output formatter we can get a nice graph of the number of tests increasing. If you like, you can run Bamboo or GoCD but I’ve not had happy experiences with either of these.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-technical-content/latest/jenkins-on-aws/jenkins-on-aws.pdf
Taking Jenkins one step further. In an ideal
More on the subject.
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-development-test-environments.pdf
Similar overview.
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws_cloud_adoption_framework.pdf
Taking a more DevOps approach to AWS.
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/AWS_DevOps.pdf
More on the subject of DevOps.
https://blog.thesparktree.com/devops-for-startups
Now we start getting to the docker meat. I’m not sure how applicable this is to a clunky monolithic Perl framework. I
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECR/latest/userguide/docker-basics.html#docker-basics-create-image
Now we get to the meat.
https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/deploy-docker-containers/?trk=gs_card
A common whinge I’ve heard is that unless you’re careful and out of the free
https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Cost_Optimization_with_AWS.pdf
Epsagon have a good trove of blogs too.
https://epsagon.com/blog/considerations-for-the-beginner-serverless-developer/
https://epsagon.com/blog/the-most-popular-deployment-tools-for-serverless/
https://epsagon.com/blog/5-ways-to-gain-serverless-observability/
https://theburningmonk.com/2017/02/yubls-road-to-serverless-architecture-part-2/
https://theburningmonk.com/2018/04/serverless-observability-what-can-you-use-out-of-the-box/
Kubernetes land is still a mystery to me. Every way I’ve tried to approach it, from linux to Mac I’ve been thwarted. Oh well, one day it’ll be mature enough and actually work for me.
https://www.salsify.com/blog/engineering/our-journey-from-heroku-to-kubernetes
Now we get to some interesting stuff. It seems hideously convoluted to be but still. It’s a Perl lambda!
A different approach.
https://github.com/moznion/aws-lambda-perl5-layer
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/serverless_app.html
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/serverless-application-model/latest/developerguide/what-is-sam.html
https://epsagon.com/blog/considerations-for-the-beginner-serverless-developer/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/serverless-and-startups/
So that’s what I have so far. I think most of the time, we’ll go EC2 and then RDS. I’d put Cloudflare on the front unless I particularly needed a Route53 feature. Serverless is still in the land of dragons and Perl isn’t spectacularly well supported. I’d like to see a world where the code pipeline is under Amazon as well as horizontal scaling with the load balancers.
This would be hilarious if it weren’t so serious. About 50,000 people got their printers hacked and had promotional printouts for YouTube Vlogger “PewDiePie” printed out. This raises the question: HOW? In the real
More seriously, it’s possible to destroy computers from afar by repeatedly writing to their firmware. This is not a desirable outcome.
Please folks, if you want to talk about security, there are people like me out there who are more than capable of doing a quick audit and vulnerability scan.
IntroductionYou’ve installed WordPress. It’s free. That’s amazing, and you get to stand on the shoulders of giants with all those great plugins. BUT! Developers need to get paid and a lot of the plugins have paid versions with the full range of features. So what can a fully fedged WordPress installation cost? This is the unspoken secret of WordPress.
These are the plugins I’m using:
Therefore in total, we’re looking at £1156 for the first year! Not insignificant, but developers have to eat!
As a contractor, phone interviews are a fact of life. We have to do them to let people know how awesome we are, plus it saves a trip into their office until we’re sure they want us and we want them. After consulting with my posse on LinkedIn and looking at lists on the internet, this is the list of phone interview tips I came up with:
And there you have it. The wisdom of crowds!
Quite a large proportion of us run blogs, typically WordPress if we want a degree of control or growth, whether for techie stuff or political agitation.
Whenever I work anywhere, I try to make sure the top priority is security. There’s no point doing anything unless you’re secure. The recent Typeform breach shows anyone is liable and their breach exposed data from Monzo bank. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t the end of the world: no passwords were leaked.
If you’re running WordPress and therefore relying on somebody else’s software, these are the things you need to do to stay secure:
<files wp-config.php> order allow, deny deny from all </files>
So this was an hilarious case of reference counting.
There I was, developing my Perl Catalyst app. I migrate to gitlab like all the other cool kids. I move the original development directory to .bak like a good boy.
But, my plackup is still running and because reference counting, the open files are all still there so I was still happily running. I check out the gitlab version, make changes and NOTHING HAPPENS. Until finally the penny drops, I quit the original, now renamed directory and re-enter the correct one.
Suddenly everything works and hilarity ensues.
Homeopathy is one of my bugbears. It’s water. 1800 scientific studies say it doesn’t work.
I fight a constant battle on Quora against homeopathy. It’s mostly Indians who seem confused between medicine proven by science and water.
Now:
“A legal challenge brought by the British Homeopathic Association against NHS England’s decision to remove homeopathic treatments from routine primary care has been dismissed on all points by the High Court.”
Sometimes the news is good. Now we can get on with important stuff like curing cancer.
Recently I had a contract which required me to immerse myself in AWS configuration for a LAMP stack, which led me to Terraform, amongst other things. I thought I’d publish here the list of resources that helped me. It’s a lot of links!
One tip I found was to use Jenkins to do automatic validation of your Terraform scripts. I think that’s a good tip.
Talk by Nicki Watt of Hashicorp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgzgVm7Sqlk
Good tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVgP63BkhKQ
Cloud Best Practices: https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/AWS_Cloud_Best_Practices.pdf
Elastic beanstalk might be a way to go: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/concepts-webserver.html
These days I tend to put everything behind an Nginx reverse proxy: https://github.com/awslabs/ecs-nginx-reverse-proxy
Some AWS Webinars: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/
Drupal. Which was quite close to what I’d be needing: https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/architecture/drupal/ and https://aws-quickstart.s3.amazonaws.com/quickstart-drupal/doc/drupal-on-the-aws-cloud.pdf and https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/architecture/drupal/ and https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-refarch-drupal
Doing your Git stuff at Amazon appears to have some advantages. CodeCommit: https://aws.amazon.com/codecommit/
AWS cost Best Practices: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/trustedadvisor/best-practices/
Web Hosting general best practices: https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-web-hosting-best-practices.pdf
A reference architecture for Drupal hosting:
If you’re on AWS it makes sense to use Amazon’s own CDN service. If however, you already have an Akamai account, it’s supported by terraform.
https://github.com/Comcast/terraform-provider-akamai
Interestingly, Terraform works across multiple cloud providers.
An introduction from Gruntwork, a Terraform consultancy: https://blog.gruntwork.io/an-introduction-to-terraform-f17df9c6d180
Terraform with AWS: https://dzone.com/articles/terraform-with-aws
Terraform getting started: https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/terraform-getting-started
Hashicorp training: https://www.hashicorp.com/training
Udemy have courses if you want to pay money: https://www.udemy.com/learn-devops-infrastructure-automation-with-terraform/
Gruntwork comprehensive guide: https://blog.gruntwork.io/a-comprehensive-guide-to-terraform-b3d32832baca
Gruntwork slideshare: https://www.slideshare.net/brikis98/comprehensive-terraform-training
Another tutorial: https://gist.github.com/p0bailey/3a34689f49b075ed058373dd73a7bce6
All about provisioners: https://www.terraform.io/docs/provisioners/index.html
If Ansible is your configurator of choice, you can shoehorn it in to Terraform.
https://alex.dzyoba.com/blog/terraform-ansible/
https://github.com/express42/terraform-ansible-example/blob/master/ansible/terraform.py
https://github.com/radekg/terraform-provisioner-ansible
https://github.com/jonmorehouse/terraform-provisioner-ansible
Chef is natively supported.
https://sdbrett.com/BrettsITBlog/2017/08/using-the-chef-provisioner-with-terraform/
Chef and AWS: https://www.chef.io/implementations/aws/
Jenkins on AWS: https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/DevOps/Jenkins_on_AWS.pdf
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/simplify-your-jenkins-builds-with-aws-codebuild/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/set-up-a-build-pipeline-with-jenkins-and-amazon-ecs/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-technical-content/latest/jenkins-on-aws/best-practices.html
https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Jenkins+Best+Practices
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-technical-content/latest/jenkins-on-aws/jenkins-on-aws.html
And there’s the link dump. It should be enough to keep you going for a couple of days! Overall, I think if you’re going to use AWS, embrace it fully. Except Cloudflare. They’re awesome.