Infrastructure continuous deployment with terraform and atlantis

Atlantis is a self-hosted golang application that listens for Terraform pull request events via webhooks. I’ve incorporated it in my recent engagement in CriticalStart but also I use it in my private infrastructure.

I think the idea is great for making terraform workflow more easy for infrastructure teams. With atlantis every terraform change need to go through review process. When PR is created it automatically run plan displaying its output as a comment. Applying is also done by adding a comment. It’s highly configurable.

Using atlantis allows to closing whole terraform workflow on PR page! I always had the feeling that checking out branch and running terraform locally is a waste of time. Now you can just look at plan in PR, do the review and continue with other work.
Sounds good? Let’s dig it!

Free git repository for private projects - GitHub vs GitLab vs BitBucket

Choosing provider for private git repositories back in the day was though.

GitHub is most known and I’d even say iconic. They started to offer unlimited private repos for paid plans in 2016.
GitLab and BitBucket at that time offered unlimited private repositories. Wow! They got me.
Currently also GitHub provides unlimited private repositories and with recent introduction of GitHub actions I think it’s good time to do the comparison between them and see who provide best services in free plan.

Note:
In this post I’m focusing on free plans but you are free to explore paid option.

Fighting Google Analytics bounce rate

More and more updates on my blog made me look into another aspect of internet blog which is monitoring web traffic. I have google analytics enabled since the beginning but recently I have also added bing and yandex. Duckduckgo which is my main search engine don’t have webmaster tools. To be fair probably just google cover over 90% of search traffic so any additionals have small impact.

When I looked into google analytics I saw bounce rate 100% on some acquisition types and time spent 0 seconds.
After some investigation I have both answer and way to improve that.

Jekyll upgrade to version 4.0.0 with theme change

Recently I’ve written a post about updating my blog. As I have a lot of ideas for new posts, it’s natural that I wanted to be sure jekyll is correct technology for me. I did some checkups and yeah! jekyll is the best technology for me right now.
Github support, development, git push to deploy changes without any additional configuration or component is making it pointless to migrate away from it.

This post will be short but for me it touches important topic of supporting and maintaing technology used to render this blog.

Prometheus on ECS - Proof of Concept

Two companies that I worked for recently used ECS (Elastic Container Service) as container orchestration tool.
If you have ever used it you know that it has somewhat limited observability out of the box.
You have two options to spin containers on ECS:

• Fargate which is serveless container engine
• EC2 instances managed by you and your team

With Fargate you don’t really need to have insights into infrastructure spinning containers, it’s serveless.
More robust and less expensive solution is to host your own fleet of EC2 instances that join ECS cluster. With that approach you need to manage them and know what’s going on there.

In this blog post I will outline possible prometheus integration with ECS using terraform. My main goal was to improve observability by introducing node monitoring with node-exporter + cadvisor and ingesting application metrics exposed by ephemeral containers.

Terragrunt upgrade to terraform 0.12

For past six months I’ve been working with terragrunt which is a thin wrapper for terraform that provides extra tools for working with multiple terraform modules.
Idea behind is awesome - make repository of modules which follows best practices and show how to write IaC properly. In this post I will outline upgrading and write some commands that helped me to automate this process.

How to run cheap Kubernetes cluster on AWS? pt1

Kubernetes

After containerization boom started, people realized that scheduling it is not as easy as it should be. That’s why I have interest in mesos, docker swarm, rancher, nomad and k8s. There’s a need for a system that will take care of correct scheduling, priorities, eviction, logs, simple cluster scaling, upgrades, deployment methods, permissions and so on… My first experience with prod grade k8s cluster was during time I worked for Spreaker/Voxnest. When I joined we had 1.4 and throughout the years it was updated to 1.12 (AFAIR). I’ve learned a lot, our relation (mine and k8s :D) had ups and downs but I was mostly satisfied and amazed by it.

Kubernetes is cool technology, really complex but have long list of benefits! I don’t want to get into details of why I think it’s superior technology to run containers today but just to name few generic ones:

• it has massive adoption in big tech companies
• a lot of development is going on, and I mean a lot
• big and helpful community
• enormous ecosystem

Or let github stars tell you the truth ;)

1. kubernetes >57k
2. rancher >12k
3. nomad >5k
4. docker swarm >5k
5. mesos >4k

Updating this blog

I haven’t been around here for quite some time. I know that you - random internet person - don’t really care so let’s get to the point. My blog was created with simplicity in mind but when I’ve returned after break I had to do improvements.
In this post I will explain what was done to improve it!

How traceroute works

Traceroute is a diagnostic program that will show route of the packets in the network.

When you request a HTTP site like this blog, you request will traverse network to the destination and server there will generate response for you. It is not guaranteed that every request you will send to the same website will follow the same route.

If you want to know which path that packet took then you will use traceroute.

Traceroute for you, for you and for you! Traceroute for everybody!

Service Discovery with mesos-dns

In previous post I used mesos-dns to provide service discovery for cluster on mesos, which is

DNS-based service discovery for Mesos

How does it work?

From time to time mesos-dns query mesos-master (so frameworks does not need to update it) and retrives data about running tasks so it can creatie appropriate DNS entries.

Any docker container that we run on marathon will be pingable via A record, any ephemeral port given by marathon will be visable via SRV record.