docker-rollout VS dotfiles

I created a CDK deploy that uses docker-rollout [1][2] to deploy highly available infrastructure to EC2 using only autoscaling groups. It is not super polished but it is a complete example, so it could be useful if you are considering hosting on EC2. Rolling out deploys involves updating one file on S3 and running one script.

Ironically after all that setup, I decided to give Linode with k8s a try [3] :-) (due to aws' high costs of egress and NAT gws / IPv4 tax on AWS, and the fact that some apps that I want to run are easier to deploy with helm).

More notes:

* I did try ECS and Fargate, which are nice, but also come with associated costs and a bunch of complexity. At that point, I rather spend time directly with k8s, which should make my localhost parity way higher, and hosting somewhere more affordable.

* I tried both Pulumi and Terraform. I have mixed feelings about them. I ended up using CDK because it _felt_ like the nicer development experience (except when CloudFormation fails and it kind of hides the reason why, sigh ... fishing for logs on CloudWatch is such a drag!).

* I tried to add some NACL rules since I ended up running the thing on a public VPC. I couldn't make it work but at that time I had already decided to host elsewhere so I left it like that :-). I did succeed on adding support for AWS WAF. Sadly, the cdk currently doesn't have high level support for WAF so it was not as nice to setup.

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1: https://github.com/Wowu/docker-rollout

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34690947

3: https://medium.com/@elliotgraebert/comparing-the-top-eight-m...

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This way, Caddy will buffer the request and give 30 seconds for your new service to get online when you're deploying a new version.

Ideally, during deployment of a new version the new version should go live and healthy before caddy starts using it (and kills the old container). I've looked at https://github.com/Wowu/docker-rollout and https://github.com/lucaslorentz/caddy-docker-proxy but haven't had time to prioritize it yet.

Source: https://github.com/susam/dotfiles/blob/main/shrc#L381

I have a similar setup for my personal and project websites. Some similarities and differences:

* I use Linode VMs ($5/month).

* I too use Debian GNU/Linux.

* The initial configuration of the VM is coded as a shell script: https://github.com/susam/dotfiles/blob/main/linode.sh

* Project-specific or service-specific configuration is coded as individual Makefiles. This takes care of creatng An example: https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/Makefile

* The software is written in Common Lisp. In case of a personal website or blog, a static website is generated by a Common Lisp program. In case of an online service or web application, the service is written as a Common Lisp program that uses Hunchentoot to process HTTP requests and return HTTP responses.

* I use Nginx too. Nginx serves the static files as well as functions as a reverse proxy when there are backend services involved. Indeed TLS termination is an important benefit it offers. Other benefits include rate limiting requests, configuring an allowlist for HTTP headers to protect the backend service, etc.

I have something similar but a little more elaborate at my ~/bin to ensure that there isn't a severe loss of quality during the conversion: https://github.com/susam/dotfiles/blob/e434b7c/bin/xmp3

I follow a similar but handcrafted approach. I have a dotfiles repo with a setup script that automates the creation or deletion of all the symbolic links: https://github.com/susam/dotfiles/blob/master/setup

So what I do on any new system is just:

  git clone https://github.com/susam/dotfiles.git