Recent content on Ryan Eschinger
ExternalDNS is a relatively new Kubernetes Incubator project that makes Ingresses and Services available via DNS. It currently supports AWS Route 53 and Google Cloud DNS. There are several similar tools available with varying features and capabilities like route53-kubernetes, Mate, and the DNS controller from Kops. While it is not there yet, the goal is for ExternalDNS to include all of the…
Kops is a relatively new tool that can be used to deploy production-ready Kubernetes clusters on AWS. It has the ability to create a highly-available cluster spanning multiple availability zones and supports a private networking topology. By default, Kops will create all of the required resources on AWS for you — the EC2 instances, the VPC and subnets, the required DNS entries in Route53 , the…
Have you ever wanted to refactor a Terraform configuration against an already existing infrastructure? In the past, modifying the Terraform state required manually editing a potentially large and confusing JSON file. Recent versions of Terraform make it possible to manipulate a Terraform state file using supported CLI commands. With this new capability, it is significantly easier to refactor an…
In version 1.12 , Docker added the ability to perform health checks directly in the Docker engine — without needing external monitoring tools or sidecar containers. Built so that the new Swarm mode orchestration layer can reschedule unhealthy containers or remove them from the load balancer pool, health checks can also be used outside of Swarm mode.
Are you using the Google Container Registry (GCR) and seeing the dreaded ImagePullBackoff status on your pods in minikube ? Are you seeing errors in your pod events like this?
A rolling update is the process of updating an application — whether it is a new version or just updated configuration — in a serial fashion. By updating one instance at a time, you are able to keep the application up and running. If you were to just update all instances at the same time, your application would likely experience downtime. In addition, performing a rolling update allows you to…
The excellent Kubernetes documentation includes a guide that covers how to build and run a Kubernetes cluster on AWS with the kube-up script. However, when it comes to customizing that install, the details are a little sparse. In this post, I am going to go over just one way you can customize the cluster. Hopefully, this will provide a little more transparency about what is going on under the hood…
Kong is an “Open-source, Microservice & API Management Layer built on top of NGINX”. Mantl is a “modern, batteries included platform for rapidly deploying globally distributed services”. I put together a short video on running Kong on Mantl. Are you interested in learning more about mantl, mesos, marathon, kubernetes, swarm, nomad, and more? Sign up below!
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 .
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…
I am a firm believer in the benefits of programmable and repeatable infrastructure for organizations of all sizes. There are a wide range of tools that are available to help you along this path but I just want to touch on two of them today: CloudFormation and Terraform .
When errors occur in your Elastic Beanstalk environment, the root cause may not always be obvious. In the browser, you may get a 502 Bad Gateway error or an error like: An unhandled lowlevel error occured. The application logs may have details. Not very helpful.
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…
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:
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.…
I was working on tuning the performance of a site that happened to be hosted on a shared hosting provider - Dreamhost in this case. One of the simplest things you can do to improve performance is enable Gzip compression for HTTP requests. This is supported in all modern browsers and provides a quick win by reducing the size of HTTP responses and, therefore, improving response times. The…
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.
In a previous post , I covered how to setup CloudFront as an asset host for a Rails application using the same site as the origin. It is also possible to use an S3 bucket as the origin. The easiest way I know of to make this work with Rails is to use the asset_sync gem.
In my last post , I may have been a little cavalier when I said it is a “no-brainer” to use CloudFront to serve assets for your Rails application. In truth, there are a few issues that can make things more complicated. One of those is the ability to serve web fonts.
Update: November 9, 2014. A few people asked me how to handle serving web fonts using CloudFront. I created a new post here that covers a few options. Moving your static assets (images, css, javascripts, etc.) to a Content Delivery Network is a quick, easy, and impactful win for the performance of your Rails application. CDNs are designed to distribute your content to multiple geographic locations…
Continuous integration and continuous deployment are two important elements of building successful web applications. Frequently merging code together and running automated tests tends to result in a healthier code base and improves the ability and speed in which a development team can release features and fix bugs. And, by automating the deployment process, you can ensure that your team can deploy…
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…
Lately, I have been working on a reporting system that involves some pretty complex queries against a large data set. I feel like I am reasonably proficient in writing SQL but I’ve always felt like performance tuning queries was a bit of a dark art. Trying to interpret long and cryptic query plans just made my head hurt. I needed something to help demystify this stuff and I found this book:…
No rocket science here - just because I always forget… If you are using rbenv with the ruby-build plugin and want to upgrade to the latest version of ruby, you might have to update ruby-build to get the latest definitions.
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.
Launching a new web application can be a nerve-wracking experience. Besides being nervous about how your users are going to respond to your product, you also have to worry about whether the site will stay up and running in the first place. It is important to be well prepared for any issues you may encounter when you unleash your web application to the public for the first time. It can be hard to…