Little trick to get AWS instance_id as variable in Nginx
If you are running in AWS environment it might be useful to get Amazon instance_id in Nginx for different purposes (logging, headers etc).
To do that we need to compile Nginx with Perl support (–with-http_perl_module flag during compilation). After that is done we can put this snippet inside of our httpd Nginx config section:
Important: While the Perl module is performing a long-running operation, …
Openssl heartbleed autofix for EC2 Amazon AMI – be aware!
You probably heard about recent security hole discovered in openssl library called Heartbleed. If not read:
http://www.openssl.org/news/secadv_20140407.txt
Anyways here is the catch – turns out Amazon can roll critical updates to all images based of Amazon AMI! …
SolrCloud in EC2. Dealing with changing IPs
If you use Amazon EC2 service for a while, you probably aware of the fact that any time you stop/start (reboot) your instance the underlying IP might change. We need to account for that when designing new services in EC2.
Lets see what happens to SolrCloud after IP change:
Note those grayed out IPs. …
AWS AutoScale with SPOT instances and dynamic tagging
I was always fascinated by idea of fully automated infrastructures, where instances come and go according to particular factors like network traffic or load increase and you just observe this process form the distance allowing system to heal itself.
Now that these days we mostly deal with Cloud providers and their great APIs, …
Provision and Bootstrap AWS instances with Chef
This is continuation of the previous post called Provision with Chef – baby steps. Today we going to talk about the process of bootstrapping instances with Chef used by FastCompany
At this point I assume that you already got chef repo setup and wondering how you could use it to configure your fresh instances. …
Provision with Chef – baby steps (installation and initial configuration)
In the previous post I wrote about our pre-chef approach for instance bootstrapping.
Today I will explain the process of our migration to Chef. I’m sure that could be useful for someone down the road, who’s trying to travel on similar route. …
Provision machines with AWS – custom bootsrapper
In the previous post I wrote a little about our transition to AWS.
Now I will tell a little more about our instance bootstrap process.
Basically at the end of the previous post we discussed tree possible options for automated machine startup:
- Create different AMI for each server role. …
History of infrastructure at FastCompany
Recently I started doing quite a bit of operations stuff at FastCompany, so I decided to write couple articles to illustrate our transition to AWS and later to Chef. There were few bumps on the road, some of you may be able to avoid them by reading these posts .. …
Bootsrap your aws nodes with chef using cloud-init
Recently I was trying to figure a way to setup chef-client on our AWS machines in a way we could start / reboot them through Amazon UI or knife.
It turns out that Amazon AMI and most official Ubuntu AMIs provide cloud-init tool which we can use to manipulate user-data. …