A blog about all layers of software development.
Buildkite is a great tool for running multi-step build and deployment pipelines. Lerna is a tool for managing multiple JavaScript packages within one git repository. Given that both Lerna and Buildkite are quite popular, it is surprising how difficult it is to set up a basic build and deployment with these tools. It is very … Continue reading Setting up Continuous Deployment with Lerna and Buildkite
Sometimes it feels that it takes more time setting up the infrastructure of an application that actually writing the application code. The following infographic from gruntwork nicely illustrates this by showing the breath of tasks one needs to undertake to get a production-grade infrastructure running:
I love VPS providers such as RamNode or ServerCheap which provide excellent performance at a low price point. Unfortunately, when going with most VPS providers, there are no easy built-in facilities for backing up and restoring the data of your servers (such as with AWS EC2 snapshots). Thankfully, there is some powerful, easy to use … Continue reading Easy VPS Backup
On first glance, logging looks like an exceedingly simple problem to solve. However, it is one of these problems which unfortunately become more and more complex the longer one looks at it. I think because of this, there are many frameworks in Java to support logging (since everyone seems to have thought they have found … Continue reading Java Logging – The Ultimate, Easy Guide
As mentioned in my previous post, I have long been looking for a centralised solution for collecting logs and monitoring metrics. I think my search was unsuccessful since I was looking for too many things in one solution. Instead I found now two separate solutions, one for log management (using Graylog) and one for metrics … Continue reading Setting up Prometheus and Grafana for CentOS / RHEL 7 Monitoring
I have been looking around for an easy to use and reasonable priced solution for managing logs distributed among many servers and system metrics for these servers. I had a brief look into setting up an ELK system but I found that looked quite cumbersome. Recently I came across Graylog and I found it looked … Continue reading Setting Up Graylog Server
I set up a Jenkins server on a brand new Centos 7 VPS. In the following the instructions for doing this in case you are looking at doing the same: Setting up Jenkins Server Install OpenJDK Java sudo yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk Add Jenkins Repo and install Jenkins sudo wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/jenkins.repo http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/redhat/jenkins.repo sudo rpm --import … Continue reading Installing Jenkins on Centos 7
Today I was looking for a simple way to test the latency and bandwidth between two Linux servers. The easiest way, of course, is to just use ping. The ping utility should be available on almost any Linux server and is extremely easy to use. Just login to one of your servers and then execute … Continue reading Test Latency Between Two Servers (Linux)
Problem You would like to resize a volume attached to an EC2 instance. Solution Do the following: Create a snapshot of your volume (instructions) Stop your instance Go to EBS / Volumes and select Actions / Modify Volume Enter the new size for your volume (note you can only ever make the volume larger) and … Continue reading Resize EC2 Volume (without Resizing Partition)
Problem You have an existing server that runs a MySQL database (either on EC2 or not) and you would like to replicate this server with a Amazon RDS MySQL instance. After you follow the instructions from Amazon, your slave reports the IO status: Slave_IO_State: Connecting to master ... and the replication does not work. Solution … Continue reading Set up MySQL Replication with Amazon RDS
