Introduction Recently AWS announced support for containers in their Lightsail service. Lightsail is a service that acted like a traditional VPS type service. Very opinionated and limited capability, but with very simple pricing constructs and really simple approach to get up and running. With this announcement you can now add containers to Lightsail and it’s really easy to get going. One issue I did run into, not sure what’s going on is is a continual login to Lightsail 400 error, Request Header or Cookie Too Large. Read more

I’ve been starting to use CDK over the last few months. It’s a really powerful way to describe your infrastructure. I’m specifically been using Python, so much of what I discuss here will be in Python where I need to reference languages. One of the things that I really liked about it, is that creating MVPs or PoCs can be really quick as there are high level constructs available out of the box. Read more

Following on from the previous post, I needed to setup some basic alerting and dashboards. Opsgenie is being used for paging, but anything that can integrate with SNS will work well. I’ll walk through here how to create alerts in CloudWatch from the metrics, and a basic dashboard using CloudFormation. I have done a quick bit of maths and if you are using this approach, it will cost about US$6.00 per instance. Read more

If you are migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and are looking to use newer instance types (specifically t3a) then you need to make sure that you have a number of modules loaded automatically. I’ve been migrating some Oracle Linux 7 hosts to AWS using CloudEndure and on the first trial run, I couldn’t work out why they were booting OK in the AWS EC2 console, but I couldn’t connect to them. Read more

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