We currently have a customer that has a legacy application that needs to be able to fail between two nodes (think old school clustering) their application, and can really only talk to it via an IP address. Since DNS is not possible, I needed a solution to move a single IP address from one node to the other. Also, this is Windows. This point is important because I’ve previously done something similar on Linux a long time ago. Read more

Recently the CloudFormation team released a transform for CloudFormation that enables Blue/Green deployments for ECS using CodeDeploy. I’ve been using ECS for a number of years now as I find that it is a lot simpler to understand that say Kubernetes. I belive Kubernetes is more suited to a team of teams that are developing microservices and you have the necessary staff in something akin to a platforms team to maintain the Kubernetes environment and associated services. Even with services like EKS there is still a more to maintain with Kubernetes. Read more

A few people asked me about Mutual Authentication, and I also wanted to see if I could get Internet access working. I’m starting with a VPC that has 3 subnets in 3 AZs (for 9 subnets in total). 3 of the subnets are marked “public” and have the default route via the IGW. In these 3 public subnets lives 3 NAT Gateways. The other 6 subnets (named app and db) have default routes via the NAT Gateways. Read more

Back around re:Invent some very observent people picked up on a slide about an AWS Client VPN being available. Which was interesting because no one had seen a blog or any release information about it. Not long (about 2 weeks) after re:Invent the AWS Client VPN made an appearance. This was great news. But it seemed maybe it was a little bit less than MVP and was rushed out due to the false starts. I was determinted to give it a try. Read more

Over the past year (or more really) containers has been a big thing and specifically Docker, and I suspect so much so that many people believe that docker and container are synonymous. This is far from the truth. Docker is really a nice wrapper that uses containers (or should that be name-spaces?) to provide a method of distributing and deploying a single application. Containers are really just a name-space in Linux which lets you control some of the resources within that name-space. It also can do fun things like renumbering your PIDs inside the name space starting from 1 again. If you look at the process list on the host though, you will see that all the name-spaced (containerised) processes all have PIDs with the default (root?) name-space. As many others have alluded to, it’s also not easy to see what name-space a particular process belongs to. Hopefully this will be fixed, but I digress. Read more