I'm a huge fan of GitHub actions and organization level secrets, but you can't see what the current secret is w/i GitHub (w/o deploying a container somewhere with it exported as an ENV var). I tried to keep a copy in my former secret management tool clipperz.is/app but drift is real. It was always too … Continue reading Managing Github Secrets with Vault
Category: Tools & Technology
Secure GitHub Deployments to Your Home
I'm a cheap bastard when it comes to online services. All my repositories have been publicly hosted on GitHub well before Microsoft swooped in and offered unlimited private repos. Since around 2016, this had been my build/deploy pipeline: You might ask how could that ssh key be comprised. Well, back in the day, CircleCI would … Continue reading Secure GitHub Deployments to Your Home
Write your own Slack chatbot in Golang
Chatbots are all the rage nowadays so I'll show you how to plug one into your own Slack channel. It's easy, fun and, best of all, completely free! I. Preparation Of course, you'll need a Slack team which I'll refer to as yourteam.slack.com throughout this post. The free plan includes up to 10 apps or … Continue reading Write your own Slack chatbot in Golang
Knife EC2: Manage Amazon EC2 Instances With Chef
Chef enables you to automate your infrastructure. It provides a command line tool called knife to help you manage your configurations. Using the knife EC2 plugin you can manage your Amazon EC2 instances with Chef. knife EC2 makes it possible to create and bootstrap Amazon EC2 instances in just one line - if you go … Continue reading Knife EC2: Manage Amazon EC2 Instances With Chef
Supporting Millions of Pretty URL Rewrites in Nginx with Lua and Redis
About a year ago, I was tasked with greatly expanding our url rewrite capabilities. Our file based, nginx rewrites were becoming a performance bottleneck and we needed to make an architectural leap that would take us to the next level of SEO wizardry. In comparison to the total number of product categories in our database, … Continue reading Supporting Millions of Pretty URL Rewrites in Nginx with Lua and Redis
Test Driven Chef Cookbooks With Meez
When cooking a new dish, things get out of control if you try to manage too many things at once You might face a similar situation when trying to write a new Chef cookbook. Getting your arms around all those tools and frameworks needed to write solid, tested cookbooks gets you spinning. You need to … Continue reading Test Driven Chef Cookbooks With Meez
How to set up wordpress on ec2 using puppet and git
Having started out on a Joyent appliance, migrating to Linode, and, finally, to Amazon with a Bitnami stack, we noticed the common pain of manually configuring each of these environments. Bitnami caused us an even bigger headache by being very difficult to update (apt-get doesn't update the bitnami wrapped AMP stack). We decided to get … Continue reading How to set up wordpress on ec2 using puppet and git
Lifecycle of a Click – Improving Web Page Speed
This is a guest post by Brian Doll, Application Performance Engineer at New Relic Six seconds can be an excruciatingly long time to wait for a single web page to load. Why does it take so long? Let's take a look at each step of the timeline and see how we can make it faster. … Continue reading Lifecycle of a Click – Improving Web Page Speed
Free Cloudkick Monitoring for EC2
For my final post in freely acquiring, maintaining and monitoring a virtual root server, I'd like to introduce you to Cloudkick. They've had a major marketing campaign going on after being acquired by the folks from Rackspace. I actually clicked through one of their ads while browsing some headlines on Slashdot. Besides free basic checks … Continue reading Free Cloudkick Monitoring for EC2
Poor Man’s Automated Snapshots for EC2
We've invested quite some time in our WordPress Micro instance now. It's definitely past the playing-around, prototype phase, so let's get some automated backups in place. But, since we already suffered to get the EC2 API Tools installed, the hard part is actually done. Let's get a couple of weekly cronjobs setup: bitnami@awo:~$ crontab -l … Continue reading Poor Man’s Automated Snapshots for EC2
Agile Web Operations 