lexicon VS Pulumi

One of the biggest benefits of dehydrated is that it doesn't try to integrate with a DNS provider on its own. It just calls a hook, which can be implemented with a simple shell script[1]. The most popular third-party integration is lexicon[2], though you're not required to use Lexicon. (e.g. you're free to use awscli, gcloud, linode-cli, etc. to do the actual DNS record manipulation)

This means its dependencies footprint is much smaller, and allows you to do things that can be a nightmare to configure with Certbot or other alternatives. For example, at one of the scenarios I had to set up was that we had to query a credential via HashiCorp Vault, which is then used to cURL into an API endpoint. The shell script in total was pretty short (< 100 LOC) and it worked extremely well.

[1]: https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated/blob/master/docs...

[2]: https://github.com/AnalogJ/lexicon

A reminder that if you an internal-only server where the typical http-01' verification connection method will not work, especially if you cannot easily/dynamically update DNS records, one can use dns-01* by using DNS aliasing/CNAME:

* https://dan.langille.org/2019/02/01/acme-domain-alias-mode/

* https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/technical-deep-dive-se...

So if you want a cert for www.internal.example.com, you will first have do a one-time change to have a _acme-challenge.www.internal… CNAME created to point to any other (sub-)domain where you can easily update things dynamically, e.g., www-internal.example-dnsapi.com.

When request the cert for "www.internal…", LE/ACME will look up the corresponding _acme-challenge record, and go to "_acme-challenge.www-internal.example-dnsapi.com. The nonce token will be there in the 'final' destination following the CNAME in a TXT, which shows LE/ACME that you control the DNS chain.

To do the DNS updating, you can use a CLI/Python library like Lexicon, which supports dozens of APIs:

* https://github.com/AnalogJ/lexicon

This leverages the ACME DNS server which has a REST API:

* https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns

If your DNS provider has an API, you can hook into that for internal-only web servers; this handy code supports several dozen APIs so you don't have to re-invent the wheel:

* https://github.com/AnalogJ/lexicon

* https://pypi.org/project/dns-lexicon/

* https://dns-lexicon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user_guide.html

> It even comes preconfigured for various DNS providers[2]

Also, CLI utility that supports a bunch of APIs:

* https://github.com/AnalogJ/lexicon

Then, you can use ddclient, which supports many DNS services (including those providing DynDNS protocol), or you can write a Python script using the dns-lexicon module to manipulate the DNS records over the API.

If you are following this blog series, you should already know the benefits of using Terraform to define and deploy your AWS resources and configuration. Other IaC solutions such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, and Pulumi work the same way but differs in the programming or configuration language.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important part of any true hosting operation in the public cloud. Each of these platforms has their own IaC solution, e.g. AWS CloudFormation. But they also support popular open-source IaC tools like Pulumi or Terraform. A category of tools that also needs to be discussed is API gateways and other app-specific load balancers. There are applications for internal consumption, which can be called microservices if you have a lot of them. And often microservices use advanced networking options such as a service mesh instead of just the native private network offered by a VPC.

funny, to me systemd == no docker, no containers, just a VM.

it's my goto way to keep my programming running and have it be restarted if the vm reboots. I use VMs like "pods". I deploy code directly to the VM and run it there along with other programs. I scale up an scale down with: https://www.pulumi.com/

Pulumi — Modern infrastructure as a code platform that allows you to use familiar programming languages and tools to build, deploy, and manage cloud infrastructure.

A move like this may have an impact in other open source projects. Take Pulumi, for instance, people might avoid choosing it now that the Linux Foundation have its own IaC tool, and for newer, smaller projects it will probably be impossible to compete with a project under the Linux name.

Another alternative to writing an operator would be to rely on kustomize or https://www.pulumi.com/.

Pulumi

Would it make sense to say Dagger is to Pulumi [1], as Terraform is to Togomak?

[1]: https://www.pulumi.com/

Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Define your infrastructure using code (IaC) to automate the provisioning of resources such as virtual machines, load balancers, and databases. Tools like Terraform, Pulumi, and AWS CloudFormation can help.