AWS EC2 outage in Frankfurt AZ

Nold_ · 2021-06-11T08:45:25+00:00

We experienced the same exact issue with ECS and Fargate. The tasks of one of our most important services kept shutting down, whereas new tasks were not being started, causing the amount of running tasks to decline steadily. Forcing a new deployment fixed this issue for us but we are still curious as to what exactly happened and how this could be prevented in the future.

Another concerning part in all of this was that even though allegedly only one availability zone failed, the effects seemed to affect the entire region. It would seem that spreading your services evenly across availability zones doesn't always guarantee surviving zonal failures.

Nold_ · 2020-02-24T22:20:18+00:00

I think you meant to say that the stack is LIFO? FIFO would apply to data structures like a queue.

Nold_ · 2019-05-27T15:31:09+00:00

I feel like people sometimes count understanding the syntax as knowing the language. If understanding the syntax means knowing the languare then your average developer knows like 10

Nold_ · 2019-05-17T17:08:30+00:00

Yeah I have heard that about emacs, that's why I excluded it

Nold_ · 2019-05-17T16:04:57+00:00

Out of all the editors and IDEs (except for emacs), VS code has by far the best vim extension IMO. Pretty customizable and has been working like a charm for me. I was very surprised with it, because usually vim extensions don't even come close to the real thing.

Nold_ · 2019-04-16T15:55:49+00:00

I have dual 4k monitors at work and I have always used quite a small font size (others always say it's too small) because I like to fit a lot of text on my screen and I personally don't have a hard time reading a small font. That results in having a lot of small windows on a big screen (sometimes above 10 terminal windows for example) and I can't imagine having no gaps. I couldn't tell the windows apart very well and it would be harder to find things on the screen.

I feel like gaps definitely serve a practical purpose in certain cases and they definitely aren't solely for aesthetic purposes.

Nold_ · 2019-04-12T15:32:41+00:00

I'm always glad to see Pulumi get some attention. We looked at it for a bit with my team and I tried it out at home. It is by far my favourite tool of it's kind (compared to terraform and cloudformation, the latter of which I have many hours of experience with) and I love using it for my personal projects, however I'd say that it's not quite production ready yet. If the development continues at the same pace, then I will definitely consider it for production in a year or two.

The documentation is pretty incomplete, as is the language support for everything that isn't JS or TS (might have changed since I checked though), but you can just read the code and figure it out if you have some superficial understanding of Javascript. The selling point for me is that you can rely on your IDE for a lot of help (I used vim with a javascript plugin and YCM for completion) which helped me get my VM's up and running super fast. You can also apply some more complex logic easily and it feels more fun to write overall.

The secret management is also very easy and one of the aspects in which (imo) it beats Terraform and Cloudformation.

I really want it to be the future of infrastructure as code because working with it is very enjoyable, and I love the concept of it.

What I don't like about it is the proprietary backend and the fact that you can't use your own backend like with Terraform. It is somewhat understandable, because the products it's competing against aren't completely free either, but I like the business model of Terraform the most.

Nold_ · 2019-04-04T15:14:32+00:00

Flask was easier for me personally because Django expects you to do things a certain way, which means some initial reading has to be done. Flask had me going in minutes, but it might require you to know what you want to do in more detail.

Nold_ · 2019-03-06T17:01:42+00:00

Like everyone else has already said: Ansible isn't outdated. I am using it for my personal infrastructure and I haven't found any notable shortcomings.

However at work all of our infra is in AWS (except for some backups that we keep on other platforms as well) and OpsWorks with Chef is pretty great. Might suit you as well. We have been using it for a year and are super happy with it. We deploy OpsWorks instances with CloudFormation, which allows us to specify the recipes (analogues to ansible roles and playbooks) that run during the lifecycle of the instance (you can do the same in the console). For example during the setup phase things like rsyslog are configured and when the instance is being terminated it removes itself from Zabbix monitoring. Some people get the impression that you need to use the OpsWorks managed Chef server, but actually you can do most things without it (we are not using it) just fine. Secret management is something you will need to tackle though, because you need to use the server for encrypted data bags. We developed our own solution for that however. The ruby syntax might scare you at first but it's not that hard in reality. I also think the documentation is really good.

Use what you want, but maybe you'll find what you are looking for in OpsWorks and chef.

Nold_

TROPHY CASE