The ramblings of a computer geek
The below gives a simple example showing how you can deploy a containerised workload: a NGINX web server in this example which has two (or more) containers (tasks) running on AWS Fargate, presented behind a “Service” definition which is then presented to the Internet via an Application Load Balancer (ALB) where a certificate is obtained … Read more
The Amazon Container Registry (ECR) allows you to store the images within the cloud, for the purposes of this example we’ll use a simple container using a Dockerfile that creates an Apache web server that says “Hello World!”. Repository The example Terraform definitions can be found within Gitlab: Step 1 – Deploy Terraform You first need … Read more
You can use EC2 Instance Session Manager to give you direct console access without the need for an SSH connection direct to the instance (which can cause some security issues), instead you can get the same kind of access via the AWS CLI. These instructions assume you have an EC2 instance already setup and working … Read more
Elastic IP Addresses (EIP) are great as they provide you with a static IP address which you can use for an endpoint to your application, but when you are automating things with Terraform, you don’t want it to be continually re-created or that IP address will change, and if you have DNS records pointing at … Read more
Building upon the example Simple Terraform Docker Example (Ubuntu Linux), we’ll store our Terraform State in AWS S3 Bucket, rather than just locally on the machine running Docker. Yes, I know its not a very useful example, but it simply illustrates the mechanism and how it can be used for more useful and complex deployments. Storing … Read more
A simple function that takes a DateTime in the format: 2023-11-29T06:41:20-08:00 and outputs it in a much more pretty: 29/11/2023 06:41:20 -0800. As you can see its switching to the DDMMYY date format, followed by the time and finally the timezone.
Read in JSON from a file and convert into a Dictionary For example I was testing getting data from the Slack service status API, so wanted to simulate broken-ness to test my script was working correctly. I did this by creating a file with a sample set of JSON that showed a problem, as I … Read more
There are a number of ways to protect secrets you wish to use in your Playbooks. I’ll show a simple example here of how you can encrypt a string, copy it into your Playbook for use and then run the Playbook, where the string is de-crypted in-line and used without exposing it in plain text … Read more
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is managing infrastructure using a DevOps type methodology. Where the current configuration of your infrastructure is represented in code, any additions, changes or deletions are also made through this code. There are various methods to codify your infrastructure, some proprietary like AWS Cloudformation, others are generic like Ansible or Terraform. The … Read more
Containerisation is an increasingly popular method to deploy and run applications on both your computer but also for enterprise applications. Containerisation essentially bundles an application’s code with all the files and libraries it needs to run. Having a layer of abstraction like this means that as long as you are running the same Operating System, … Read more