Aws on jen20.dev

Ubuntu 20.04 With Root ZFS in AWS

hello@jen20.com (James Nugent) — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 17:00:00 +0000

For several years now, I’ve been running all my AWS instances with a recent long-term support edition of Ubuntu server, ZFS as the root file system. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was released today, so I’ve updated my Packer templates - the original inspiration for the amazon-ebssurrogate builder - to support it!

Ubuntu 20.04 has some nice new features, including:

ZFS on Linux version 0.8.3,
Linux Kernel version 5.4, including io_uring and built-in support for WireGuard,
Up-to-date compiler and runtime packages for a variety of platforms.

Since I last updated these templates, HashiCorp have also added a feature to Packer to allow templates to be authored in HashiCorp Configuration Language v2 instead of JSON.

Ubuntu 18.4 With Root ZFS on AWS

hello@jen20.com (James Nugent) — Tue, 09 Oct 2018 12:20:00 +0000

Last year, I posted about how to build Ubuntu 16.04 AMIs using HashiCorp Packer’s ebs-surrogate builder. Since then Ubuntu 18.04 has been released, and the process has changed a little.

Windows AMIs With Even Fewer Tears

hello@jen20.com (James Nugent) — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 14:00:00 +0000

Some recent image building work I was doing required images based on Windows Server. One of my more popular posts, Windows AMIs Without the Tears, detailed the fraught endeavor of making the WinRM management system work for this purpose, but since then Microsoft have substantially improved the situation by committing engineering effort to porting OpenSSH to Windows.

Building ZFS Root Ubuntu AMIs With Packer

hello@jen20.com (James Nugent) — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 21:00:00 +0000

For all applications of importance or significance, we recommend using ZFS. On bare metal servers, ZFS is king of the hill, but on AWS and Linux it is still gaining traction. Data integrity guarantees as well as features such as “instantaneous” snapshots, compression, quotas, and the ability to send/receive datasets make ZFS very compelling. In this post, we’re going to demonstrate how to build from-scratch AMIs booting Ubuntu Linux with a ZFS root file system.

Managing IAM Policies in HCL With Terraform

hello@jen20.com (James Nugent) — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 12:00:00 +0000

IAM Policy Documents are ubiquitous in AWS - they are used not only for standalone policies you might attach to users or roles, but also for S3 bucket policies, SNS topic policies and more. Unfortunately, the JSON syntax can be error prone to hand write, and the default mechanism for creating policies in many configuration management tools is template rendering.

Configuring AWS AutoScaling Event Notifications in Slack

hello@jen20.com (James Nugent) — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 17:00:00 +0000

One of the easiest ways of building resilience into a system running in AWS is to use an autoscaling group. Generally speaking, I use one for any service which is required to self-heal - even when aiming to maintain a steady number of instances, as is desirable when running servers for Consul and Nomad, as well as a whole host of other clustered systems. Unhealthy instances can simply be replaced, usually without operator intervention, and launch configurations can be used to simplify upgrading clustered software one instance at a time.

Windows AMIs Without The Tears

hello@jen20.com (James Nugent) — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 14:00:00 +0000

Twice in the last couple of weeks I’ve helped automate build infrastructure in AWS, first for Event Store and then secondly for another company. Both times we got 90% of the way there using great tools like Terraform and Packer, and fell at the last hurdle: how do you build Windows images in an automated fashion (i.e. no point-and-click)?