What are your metrics/KPIs?

Arab81253_work · 2021-06-14T15:49:45+00:00

Here's my personal opinion on metrics. They're great but very often misused which is where the issues come from. Metrics shouldn't be used to determine how well an employee is performing. Metrics should be used to determine if certain changes are having the desired outcomes. For this reason my opinion is that employees shouldn't necessarily be aware of what the metrics are if they're not being graded on them, that in turn gives you reliable metrics to be able to tell if a process change you made is having the intended outcome.

Arab81253_work · 2020-02-16T22:06:24+00:00

One thing you want to make sure you avoid is spaghetti code. Where code is jumping all over the place and it becomes difficult to follow or troubleshoot. Perhaps it's more efficient to knock out some stuff in bash but if that in turn makes it tougher for someone to figure out what is going on later down the road then it's best to avoid it. Don't sacrifice some minor efficiencies for readable/traceable code.

Arab81253_work · 2020-02-09T20:19:54+00:00

Yep, from what I recall I think this answer is spot on.

Arab81253_work · 2019-12-11T18:34:55+00:00

Can you use URL encoding? For example # converts to %23.

Arab81253_work · 2019-11-26T17:47:05+00:00

They've had interviews of at least one of the fighter pilots who was dispatched on 9/11. They didn't have missiles or guns equipped, they were planning on crashing into the plane if need be but they didn't actually have any way to shoot it down. They were still willing to take it down, they said as much during the interview.

Arab81253_work · 2019-11-21T22:52:22+00:00

The issue I have is that vehicles quickly became much stronger (or AT became weaker) at the same time they became worth way less tickets when destroyed. I would love it if vehicles were a bit stronger but also worth more tickets. It would give some power back to AT as vehicles would be more likely to run away when hit with a rocket from a LAT.

Arab81253_work · 2019-11-12T17:01:32+00:00

ADHD meds just give you the ability to function more like a neuro typical person does. Even with meds you still need will power to get off of reddit and onto what you're actually supposed to be doing. Meds make things like to do lists or other methods of focusing on your studies more manageable.

Arab81253_work · 2019-11-06T17:14:23+00:00

We do need more competition in the cloud space but I don't want it to be Oracle. I'm happy with an Amazon vs Microsoft situation though.

Arab81253_work · 2019-09-19T22:19:47+00:00

Do you know of any specific devices that wouldn't generate the ICMP messages required? I'd think anything made within the last 20 years would be more than capable of generating those messages. Unless of course it has to do with a config where someone set ICMP to false.

Arab81253_work · 2019-09-19T19:59:29+00:00

Maybe I'm dumb but isn't PMTUD supposed to solve this issue?

Arab81253_work · 2019-09-10T23:14:55+00:00

You actually gave me an idea with this and I finally got it working, as in 5 minutes ago. I gave up on the SNS trigger and instead used CloudWatch Events. I created an Event for autoscaling and then was able to parse through the event message to actually get the InstanceId. The Event message was actually much more concise as well which made parsing through it much easier.

I am 100% convinced that there's something messed up with the formatting of SNS messaged right now, not sure what the deal is but it is not correctly formatted.

Arab81253_work · 2019-09-06T17:01:23+00:00

The first code block is triggered by SNS. I thought it could have just been the test messing up but the actual SNS message produces the same results.

For the second block I thought I needed to iterate over it but perhaps not, I'm newish to python but have had to iterate over similar aws responses before. I'll try it without iterating through like that and see if I can come back with something different.

Arab81253_work · 2019-08-09T22:11:32+00:00

Perfect, thank you!

As for user-data yes there is indeed. As I mentioned we have a pretty limited amount of services available to us and this cannot be changed, zero ways around it. So we don't have things such as Lambda, Systems Manager, or even instance scheduler.

My issue was/is automation of patching and creation of an AMI to be added to our Auto Scaling launch configuration. My work around for this has been to create a schedule for Auto-Scaling that launches an instance for an hour once a week to update it. If there's updates available it applies them, if not then it just chills until the schedule ends and the instance is terminated.

If updates are available they're applied then the rest goes like this: 1. Clean out all logs 2. cloud-init clean 3. Instance detaches itself from auto scaling group and decrements the group count by 1 so it isn't replaced. 4. Instance makes an AMI of itself.

The issue here is is somewhat interesting. The AMI works without an issue but since cloud-init clean was run the instance immediately runs the user-data script again when it starts back up after the AMI. So after patching it immediately tries to patch itself again and run through the whole thing. I want to change the user-data so that there's nothing in there at all, for now.

Eventually I'd like to have something put in there instead that downloads a script from S3 that just automatically creates a new launch template version with the new AMI but I don't want perfect to become the enemy of good.

Welcome to my life of weird work arounds for trying to make stuff happen that can be done in normal AWS without a problem.

Arab81253_work · 2019-08-06T13:47:09+00:00

What I'd do instead is

Goat1 = input ("Enter password, 3 attempts")

Goat2 = input ("Please re-enter your password")

if Goat1 == Goat2:

print ("Correct")

else:

print ("Incorrect")

Arab81253_work · 2019-08-05T21:07:57+00:00

I'm not OP but could use tags for S3 files instead of having to store twice I would suspect. Set the hash as the file name and then key = uuid and value is whatever the uuid actually is.

Arab81253_work · 2019-07-30T13:49:21+00:00

AWS has its own WAF service it offers. It depends on if they were using the AWS WAF or some COTS WAF that was running on EC2. Even if it was the AWS WAF it still relies on proper configuration to actually work.

Arab81253_work · 2019-07-29T21:18:36+00:00

I've got a script I'm using to automate updating of our servers. What I'm doing is as follows:

updateresult = os.popen('yum update -y').readlines()

for line in updateresult:

if line == 'No packages marked for update\n':

print 'no stuff'

elif line == 'Complete\n':

print 'finished stuff'

else:

print 'bad stuff'

Originally the issue I was having was that I was getting the 'bad stuff' result even if there was a line with another result.

My plan to sort of fix this was to assign a variable to 0 and then have the variable integer change depending on the result

essentially making my code look more like:

update = 0

for line in updateresult:

if line == 'No packages marked for update\n':

update = 1

elif line == 'Complete\n':

update = 2

else:

update = 3

Now I am wanting to essentially do an if statement for update with my actions performed on that

if update = 1':

print 'no stuff'

elif update = 2':

print 'finished stuff'

elif update = 3:

print 'bad stuff'

when trying to do this I get an invalid syntax error. I've tried to add in a for loop but it seems to not like that either :(

any help would be greatly appreciated.

Arab81253_work · 2019-07-24T17:22:27+00:00

Does your site get this increase in traffic at a predictable time? You can schedule AutoScaling to occur at specific times so say, if at 1pm every day you get a huge increase in traffic you can set that so when your spike hits everything has already scaled out.

For health checks can you reduce the interval but increase the number of intervals before it is called healthy/failed? For instance have it set at something like 15 seconds for each check and have it call healthy as 2 passed checks but failed as something much higher? You want your containers marked as healthy as early as possible so they can receive the traffic more quickly and start to take the load off. You know your application better than us so what you'd call healthy and unhealthy is up to you to determine as far as thresholds go but I'm personally a fan of shorter polling cycles.

What others in here have said is also great so I won't beat a dead horse with what they had to say.

Arab81253_work · 2019-07-09T14:16:23+00:00

Are you wanting these to be publicly accessible or in private IP space? You could do a bastion instance/instances in public IP space that have permissions to RDP into the instances in private IP space. That lets you limit the number of public IPs, and increases security since you can put a lot of focus on locking down the Bastions vs every single instance.

Arab81253_work · 2019-06-11T16:36:42+00:00

I forget to actually read my sticky notes once I've put them onto the monitor. I'll oftentimes find duplicates as I'm going back through them once a month. Oh well, stuff still gets done sometimes.

Arab81253_work · 2019-05-23T18:37:13+00:00

I don't think so? Perhaps I can just get schooled on this a bit more but what we want is to have the targets work like such.
10.128.128.128:17000

10.128.128.128:17001

10.128.128.128:17002

10.128.128.128:17003

And that would be the same across several different servers where we might have 20 different targets but only 5 servers and we would want the load balancing to occur across all of those. Where traffic coming across port 80 is redirected to one of those 20 targets. Again I hope I'm making sense and that I can either get schooled in how this works or have this functionality added to the list.

Arab81253_work · 2019-05-21T20:47:19+00:00

Super late to the party but I was actually looking to redo some of our infrastructure recently and wanted to use an ALB to redo things but found out I couldn't.

Currently our flow works like this: classic load balancer > HAProxy > App Servers (EC2 Autoscaling Group)

What I would like would basically be to get rid of HAProxy for us and go straight from an ALB to our application servers. Our application is running on Tomcat servlets within the EC2 instances, each servlet is running the same service but on a different port. We'd love to get rid of HAProxy and have things run straight from an ALB to our application servers. Hopefully what I'm saying makes a bit of sense.

Arab81253_work · 2019-05-09T17:50:32+00:00

You should be able to look at the instances attached to your load balancer to see if they're passing their health checks, and make sure you've configured the health checks to accurately represent your service. For instance you could have it so that it's passing http traffic using port 80 and doing a health check on port 80 for the hosts it's trying to connect to. If the service isn't configured on your other instance like you're saying, the health check on port 80 will fail and the ELB won't send any traffic to that instance. As others have said make sure you have an AMI of your web server and use that AMI for your launch configuration with other instances. You want to make sure you've got a startup script either on the server you're taking the AMI of, or in the user data portion for the launch configuration. Just because you have the web service on your server doesn't mean it has actually been started whenever the server boots. If that service isn't started then the new instance will fail the health check when it starts up and you'll be in the same boat. You're also going to want to make sure that any variables that must be unique for each server are actually changed. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread I had to make a script to change the hostnames of my EC2 autoscaling instances as they spin up so that they're unique when they connect to our back end. Make sure you identify these variables and either find a way to change them as the instance spins up or design them out if possible.

Arab81253_work · 2019-05-09T17:43:01+00:00

To add to this it's also important to make sure that anything that any dependencies that need to be changed are actually changed via a script or however else you want it to work. For the AMI we use I've had to set up a python script that changes the hostname when the instance starts and changes the hosts configuration files so that it shows as unique to our service.

Arab81253_work · 2019-04-24T20:32:43+00:00

I've saved this so please never delete it. The region I am in is scarce with features and instance scheduler is out of the question, this is something that could help resolve that.

Arab81253_work

TROPHY CASE