Throughout these past 4 years since AWS ECS became generally available, I’ve had the opportunity to manage 4 major ECS cluster deployments. Across these deployments, I’ve built up knowledge and tools to help manage them, make them safer, more reliable, and cheaper to run. This article has a bunch of tips and tricks I’ve learned… Continue reading Managing ECS clusters, 4 years in.
Category: English
“Truth in bots”
The bots should announce, “I’m not a person, or if I am, I’m not allowed to act like one.” Or, if there’s no room or time for that sentence, perhaps a simple bot at the top of the conversation. That way, we can save our human emotions for the humans who will appreciate them. —… Continue reading “Truth in bots”
AWS Application Auto-scaling for ECS with Terraform
Update: Target tracking scaling is now available for ECS services. I’ve been working on setting up autoscaling settings for ECS services recently, and here are a couple notes from managing auto-scaling for ECS services using Terraform. min_capacity and max_capacity must both be set. schedule uses the CloudWatch schedule expression syntax, with the addition of the… Continue reading AWS Application Auto-scaling for ECS with Terraform
ECS ChatOps with CodePipeline and Slack
I’m currently working on migrating a Rails application to ECS at work. The current system uses a heavily customized Capistrano setup that’s showing its signs, especially when deploying to more than 10 instances at once. While patiently waiting for EKS, I decided to use ECS over manage my own Kubernetes cluster on AWS using something… Continue reading ECS ChatOps with CodePipeline and Slack
2017: A year in review
A few years ago when I was doing client work, we would regularly host clients’ sites and apps for them. During this time, I was responsible for both development and keeping them up and running as much as possible. Most of the money being in new development, it was difficult to assign priority to improving… Continue reading 2017: A year in review
Shipping Events from Fluentd to Elasticsearch
We use fluentd to process and route log events from our various applications. It’s simple, safe, and flexible. With at-least-once delivery by default, log events are buffered at every step before they’re sent off to the various storage backends. However, there are some caveats with using Elasticsearch as a backend. Currently, our setup looks something… Continue reading Shipping Events from Fluentd to Elasticsearch
Upgrading PostgreSQL on Ubuntu
I recently started using Ubuntu Linux on my main development machine. That means that my PostgreSQL database is running under Ubuntu, as well. I’ve written guides to upgrading PostgreSQL using Homebrew in the past, but the upgrade process under Ubuntu was much smoother. These steps are assuming that you use Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and PostgreSQL… Continue reading Upgrading PostgreSQL on Ubuntu
macOS Sierra
Here are the headline features of Sierra, and my thoughts about them. Siri Don’t use it on the phone, won’t use it on the Mac. It would be nice if I could use it by typing, though. Universal Clipboard This seems like a massive security risk. It works via iCloud, so if someone (like my… Continue reading macOS Sierra
Convox
I stumbled upon Convox a couple weeks ago, and found it pretty interesting. It’s led by a few people formerly from Heroku, and it certainly feels like it. A simple command-line interface to manage your applications on AWS, with almost no AWS-specific configuration required. An example of how simple it is to deploy a new… Continue reading Convox
A month with Linux on the Desktop
It’s been a bit over a month since I installed Linux as my main desktop OS on a PC I built to replace OS X on a (cylinder) Mac Pro. I installed Ubuntu MATE 16.04. Here are my general thoughts: Linux has come a far way in 6 years (last time I used it full-time… Continue reading A month with Linux on the Desktop