Tag Archives: aws

Automatically restarting GNU/Linux hosts upon hung storage

We recently experienced a weird and frustrating problem with storage reliability on our RabbitMQ cluster running on AWS c5-series EC2 instances with EBS storage and Ubuntu LTS 16.04. One of our three-node RabbitMQ cluster instances will experience an issue that … Continue reading

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Scaling backend infrastructure to handle millions of phones (Mobile Refresh 2018)

I recently had the pleasure to speak at the 2018 Mobile Refresh conference held here in Wellington and did a talk introducing how we run some parts of the Sailthru Mobile platform, along with recommendations and advice to anyone else … Continue reading

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Deep Dive into ECS

I spent a fair bit of time in 2017 re-architecting the carnival.io platform onto Amazon ECS, including working to handle some tricky autoscaling challenges brought on by the nature of the sudden high-load spikes experienced when we deliver push messages to customers. … Continue reading

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Puppet Autosigning & Cloud Recommendations

I was over in Sydney this week attending linux.conf.au 2018 and made a short presentation at the Sysadmin miniconf regarding deploying Puppet in cloud environments. The majority of this talk covers the Puppet autosigning process which is a big potential … Continue reading

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Access Route53 private zones cross account

Using Route53 private zones can be a great way to maintain a private internal zone for your server infrastructure. However sometimes you may need to share this zone with another VPC in the same or in another AWS account. The … Continue reading

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FailberryPi – Diverse carrier links for your home data center

Given the amount of internet connected things I now rely on at home, I’ve been considering redundant internet links for a while. And thanks to the affordability of 3G/4G connectivity, it’s easier than ever to have a completely diverse carrier … Continue reading

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StuffMe? Or Just Stuffed?

The big news today is that the NZ Commerce Commission has declined the NZME/Fairfax merger. There’s plenty of coverage from the various news companies around NZ, but does it really matter? Either way NZME and Fairfax are stuffed – merger … Continue reading

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Detectatron

I recently installed security cameras around my house which are doing an awesome job of recording all the events that take place around my house and grounds (generally of the feline variety). Unfortunately the motion capture tends to be overly trigger happy … Continue reading

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Fairfax’s Cloud Journey at Auckland AWS Summit 2016

I recently presented at the 2016 AWS Summit Auckland about Fairfax’s cloud journey as part of the business stream “Key Steps for Setting up your AWS Journey for Success” alongside two excellent Amazon engineers. It’s a bit different from my usual … Continue reading

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Node.js deployments at Fairfax with Code Deploy, Codeship and 12factor

This week I presented at the Node.js Wellington meetup around the tooling we have setup at Fairfax for running micro services for Node.js apps. Essentially we have a workflow that uses Codeship for CI/CD and AWS Code Deploy for deployment. Our apps … Continue reading

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