Ansible

Recently I posted about how to gracefully handle the termination of AWS Spot Instances. After some time in production it turned out not to be as reliable as I wished. Sometimes the Ansible environment wasn't in order or the script exited for no apparent reason. It was time for an update. The requirements were: must be portable and independent must provide a safe Ansible environment including boto for AWS API interaction The solution was obviously a Docker container. But why would you create a ~120MB container just to run some Bash and Ansible? Mostly because of the advantages that Ansible »

In November 2015 we started using AWS Elastic Container Service in production. I became deeply involved with this new product of AWS and quickly found its up- and downsides (i.e.: You still can't delete Task Definitions, wtf AWS, we have like 200 of them by now). We had to invent several tweaks in order to get all microservices we run into containers. By now we mostly control ECS via its API because the console is very confusing and overloaded. Customized ECS instances We created a specific AMI that is used as the root partition of a new instance. Two »