libaws VS Portainer

i print the error along with file and line number every time i return it. clunky, but it works.

in fact i print file and line with every log message.

https://github.com/nathants/libaws/blob/87fb45b4cae20abd1bb1...

cloud is so good now it’s hard to justify not doing something bespoke. ec2 spot is insanely cheaper than turnkey cicd, and better in almost every way.

i’m delighted to pay 30% over infra cost for convenience, but not 500%. and it better actually be convenient, not just have a good landing page and sales team.

this month i learned localzones have even better spot prices. losangeles-1 is half the spot price of us-west-2.

for a runner, do something like this, but react to an http call instead of a s3 put[1].

for a web ui do something like this[2].

s3, lambda, and ec2 spot are a perfect fit for cicd and a lot more.

1. https://github.com/nathants/libaws/tree/91b1c27fc947e067ed46...

2. https://github.com/nathants/aws-exec/tree/e68769126b5aae0e35...

like linux, cloud is a lot to learn, but worth it.

like linux, cloud is best kept simple, or it can become brittle and confusing.

like linux, cloud has a lot of cool things like zfs, that should be appreciated but rarely used.

like linux, using go makes your life a lot easier. the aws go sdk is the documentation.

like linux, you have to learn a lot and then find the core utility you actually care about. for me it is:

https://github.com/nathants/libaws

the good new is, for the 95% of projects that can tolerate it, aws the good parts are actually both simple and easy[1].

it’s hard to find things you can’t build on s3, dynamo, lambda, and ec2.

if either compliance or a 5% project demand it, complicated solutions should be explored.

1. https://github.com/nathants/libaws

i also wanted a good cli for aws, and built one:

https://github.com/nathants/libaws

companies like fly are fantastic.

they provide a good service, and they put market pressure on aws.

cool transition and fun writeup!

for low, intermittent traffic sites, go on lambda might be a better comparison:

https://github.com/nathants/libaws/tree/master/examples/simp...

lambda + s3. add ec2 spot if you need it.

just make sure you understand how billing works. mostly it’s just egress bandwidth is expensive.

do something like this:

https://github.com/nathants/aws-gocljs

or with less opinions:

https://github.com/nathants/libaws/tree/master/examples/simp...

welcome to cloud, glhf!

aws ux for retaining both hair and sanity.

https://github.com/nathants/libaws

build and scale systems with artificial load on aws! scaling the load testing will be just as interesting as scaling the system under test.

start with low bottlenecks, ie a cluster of c6i.large ec2 spot. how fast can you do this? have fast can you scale that? ec2 and s3 is all you need to build anything.

use ec2 spot, avoid network egress, avoid cross region/zone traffic, create and destroy ec2 instances as needed instead of letting them sit idle. you could grow system scaling intution for the price of your streaming subscriptions.

start with something like this:

https://github.com/nathants/libaws/tree/master/examples/comp...

maybe mess around with public datasets on aws, just make sure to be in the correct region to avoid data egress.

welcome systems friend. one accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions. scaling is fun!

aws has too many knobs, presumably to satisfy the union of the needs of all the enterprise customers. that said, lambda+s3+dynamodb+ec2 are pretty good once you tape over all the knobs that aren't needed. i work with them like this[1].

these days i build on aws and r2. aws for the nuts and bolts, r2 for high bandwidth egress. it's a perfect match.

1. https://github.com/nathants/libaws

Portainer

> Any tips on the minimum hardware or VPS's needed to get a small swarm cluster setup?

From my testing, Docker Swarm is very lightweight, uses less memory than both Hashicorp Nomad and lightweight Kubernetes distros (like K3s). Most of the resource requirements will depend on what containers you actually want to run on the nodes.

You might build a cluster from a bunch of Raspberry Pis, some old OptiPlex boxes or laptops, or whatever you have laying around and it's mostly going to be okay. On a practical level, anything with 1-2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM will be okay for running any actually useful software, like a web server/reverse proxy, some databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB), as well as either something for a back end or some pre-packaged software, like Nextcloud.

So, even 5$/month VPSes are more than suitable, even from some of the more cheap hosts like Hetzner or Contabo (though the latter has a bad rep for limited/no support).

That said, you might also want to look at something like Portainer for a nice web based UI, for administering the cluster more easily, it really helps with discoverability and also gives you redeploy web hooks, to make CI easier: https://www.portainer.io/ (works for both Docker Swarm as well as Kubernetes, except the Kubernetes ingress control was a little bit clunky with Traefik instead of Nginx)

In this section, we will add Portainer to help us in managing our Docker containers. You can find more details about it here. To integrate Portainer into our EC2 project, we can follow these steps:

Git issues pointing to: https://docs.portainer.io/v/ce-2.9/start/install/agent/swarm/linux gives a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.

I am currently running Portainer, but webhooks (GitOps) appear to be broken ( [2.19.0] GitOps Updates not automatically polling from git · Issue #10309 · portainer/portainer · GitHub ) and so I cannot send webhook to redeploy a stack. So, looking for alternatives. Using this as a good excuse to learn more about docker and CI/CD etc.

A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

This works better than I can possibly tell you.

I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

> I've come to the conclusion (after trying kops, kubespray, kubeadm, kubeone, GKE, EKS) that if you're looking for < 100 node cluster, docker swarm should suffice. Easier to setup, maintain and upgrade.

Personally, I'd also consider throwing Portainer in there, which gives you both a nice way to interact with the cluster, as well as things like webhooks: https://www.portainer.io/

With something like Apache, Nginx, Caddy or something else acting as your "ingress" (taking care of TLS, reverse proxy, headers, rate limits, sometimes mTLS etc.) it's a surprisingly simple setup, at least for simple architectures.

casaos it just makes things like backups, offsite syncing and many other nas related things so much easier to manage. And gives you a proper nas like experience similar to that in which you'd fine on companies like tnas or synology. I actually also use it as a replacement for portainer when i don't need the more advanced features it offers

> I moved to docker swarm and love it. It's so much easier, straight forward, automatic ingress network and failover were all working out of the box. I'll stay with swarm for now.

I've had decent luck in the past with the K3s distribution, which is a bit cut down Kubernetes: https://k3s.io/

It also integrates nicely with Portainer (aside from occasional Traefik ingress weirdness sometimes), which I already use for Swarm and would suggest to anyone that wants a nice web based UI: https://www.portainer.io/

Others might also mention K0s, MicroK8s or others - there's lots of options there. But even so, I still run Docker Swarm for most of my private stuff as well and it's a breeze.

For my needs, it has just the right amount of abstractions: stacks with services that use networks and can have some storage in the form of volumes or bind mounts. Configuration in the form of environment variables and/or mounted files (or secrets), some deployment constraints and dependencies sometimes, some health checks and restart policies, as well as resource limits.

If I need a mail server, then I just have a container that binds to the ports (even low port numbers) that I need and configure it. If I need a web server, then I can just run Apache/Nginx/Caddy and use more or less 1:1 configuration files that I'd use when setting up either outside of containers, but with the added benefit of being able to refer to other apps by their service names (or aliases, if they have underscores in the names, which sometimes isn't liked).

At a certain scale, it's dead simple to use - no need for PVs and PVCs, no need for Ingress and Service abstractions, or lots and lots of templating that Helm charts would have (although those are nice in other ways).