AWS

I finally added an X-Clacks-Overhead header to my site, woohoo!

What is that, and why finally?

Another week passes, and what a good one it was!

The highlight was definitely the BCS Annual Conference on Wednesday and Thursday. I haven’t sifted through the notes I made and links I saved yet so I’ll come back to that later.

Some other stuff I got up to:

Oops #

So I recently picked up my Rundeck project again. My “production” instance has been running mostly* A-OK for many months now - except for 1 blip, it has got off easy. I’ve been using it as an unusual home for my own “documentation” of sorts. My plan for a third Rundeck blog post has been on the back-burner for a while, now beneath a virtual pile of other drafts. Now seemed good a time as any to resume my blog plans, starting where I left off!

My original plan was adding to the playbook so it configured the Rundeck Ansible Plugin as well. Ansible configuring Ansible. Instead of diving into the original plan I thought I’d re-familiarize myself with one layer of Ansible first.

As it happened, I had the inspiration I needed to start working on a money-saving playbook…

Following on from Part I, I’ve now starting writing an Ansible playbook for creating a Rundeck server in AWS - which can currently provision and terminate a Rundeck server. No more CloudFormation to deploy a new instance woohoo!

Why migrate to AWS? #

As well as catching up on drafted blog posts last weekend, I migrated this blog from GitHub Pages, KloudSec, Domain Registrar’s DNS & Let’s Encrypt to Amazon Web Services: S3, CloudFront, Route53 & Certificate Manager. I also introduced Travis CI and continued using GitHub for version control (but no longer hosting). This migration to AWS was in light of one of my apprehensions about KloudSec unfortunately materializing - it was a fairly small and new company and has recently ceased to exist. As such my Let’s Encrypt certificate had expired and was no longer auto-renewed by KloudSec so my blog was showing a HTTPS error when you visited it - boo. Time to pay for a risky design choice…

Then… #

A few months ago I started playing around with Rundeck - a platform for runbook automation, job scheduling, incident response, post-build deployment automation, environment provisioning, data processing jobs and anything you like really it seems, according to its website.

This all sounded very interesting so I set about trying out the vagrant image locally at first, then quickly decided I’d like to get an instance running in AWS with the EC2 plugin so I could control a few nodes with it and really test it out…