The ramblings of a computer geek
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
To install Docker on Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS you can use these simple instructions, these are based on a standard Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS installation and using a user called “ubuntu”. Once downloaded make sure it is executable with: Now run the installation with the following, the script has sudo commands added so you may need to … Read more
A simple HTML based status page tool that allows you as a system administrator to just edit a CSV file and have the tool generate you a pre-formatted HTML status page that you can upload to your favourite website. The tool uses Python to read the CSV files for the status (of services) and any … Read more
A very quick overview of how you can use Python virtual environments. https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/installing-using-pip-and-virtual-environments/ Install the Virtual Environment First install the virtual environment. Create the Virtual Environment Let’s say I have a project called “python-static-site”, so we’ll create the virtual environment within this project directory along with all the source files. The second argument is the … Read more