More control is a good thing, right? I mean, who doesn’t want the ability to twist every knob and tweak every settings to your heart’s desire so that each minute detail of your infrastructure is artisanally handcrafted? I’ll tell you who: this guy! Why? Because I have neither the time, energy, nor expertise to even begin to understand the impact of most of those configuration changes. Not only that, but I likely don’t even have the information needed to understand which optimizations are required, let alone a way to prioritize them.
Tag: server management
How To: Access Your AWS VPC-based Elasticsearch Cluster Locally
AWS recently announced that their Elasticsearch Service now supports VPC, which is awesome, for a number of reasons:
1. No more signing every request
Remember this?
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let creds = new AWS.SharedIniFileCredentials({profile: esProfile }); let signer = new AWS.Signers.V4(req, 'es'); signer.addAuthorization(creds, new Date()); |
Every request had to be signed with AWS’s SigV4 so that the Elasticsearch endpoint could be properly authorized. That meant additional code to sign all your requests, and additional time for the endpoint to decode it. It might only be a few milliseconds of extra processing time, but those can add up. Now we can call our VPC Elasticsearch endpoint with a simple HTTP request.
Solve Your Own Problem…And You Have At Least One Customer
Last week I was deploying an app to AWS Lambda using Serverless and I accidentally misspelled a stage name. This resulted in deploying an entire CloudFormation stack with the wrong name, which wasted time and resources. I immediately realized that I spelled it wrong, so I was able to undeploy the stack quickly. I fully admit that misspelling the name was my fault, but since Serverless can deploy complex CloudFormation stacks that provision users, databases, SNS topics, etc., it seemed like there should be a better way to avoid this simple mistake.
Going Serverless
Posted in Serverless on April 5, 2016
Design patterns and server architecture change over time as technology changes. Advancements in cloud computing has created unprecedented opportunities for organizations large and small to leverage shared resources to create faster, more reliable application stacks. This allows organizations to better serve their customers with highly-available services tailored to the needs of narrower customer segments. With this new level of flexibility and power, organizations must choose how best to utilize these resources to maximize their efforts and provide the iteration capacity to adapt quickly in rapidly changing markets.
How To: Install phpMyAdmin on Amazon Linux
I’ve been managing a few small MySQL databases lately that often need record updates but certainly don’t warrant building a separate management interface. The easiest way to accomplish this (assuming you don’t have complicated joins and relationships) is to install phpMyAdmin, a robust, web-based admin utility for MySQL that is built in php. In my case, I’m running these mostly on Amazon Linux instances, so after a little poking around, it turns out the installation is just 3 simple steps.
How To: Install wkhtmltopdf on Amazon Linux
The other day I was optimizing a reporting engine and needed a quick and easy way to generate PDFs from HTML templates. There are several options out there, but after some research, I decided to use wkhtmltopdf (http://wkhtmltopdf.org). It then took me a few hours of scouring the Internet to find the appropriate steps to install it on Amazon Linux. I kept running into a series of problems with the version, required libraries, and font kerning. Some trial and error, and help from some others, finally got me up and running. Here’s what worked for me.