Tag Archives: amazon

How much swap should I use on my VM?

Lately a couple people have asked me about how much swap space is “right” for their servers – especially in the context of running low spec machines like AWS t2.nano/t2.micro or Digital Ocean boxes with low allocations like 1GB or 512MB … Continue reading

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The Proprietary Renaissance

noun, re·nais·sance often attributive \ˌre-nə-ˈsän(t)s, -ˈzän(t)s, -ˈsäⁿs, -ˈzäⁿs, ˈre-nə-ˌ, chiefly British ri-ˈnā-sən(t)s\ : a situation or period of time when there is a new interest in something that has not been popular in a long time : a period of … Continue reading

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Your cloud pricing isn’t webscale

Thankfully in 2015 most (but not all) proprietary software providers have moved away from the archaic ideology of software being licensed by the CPU core – a concept that reflected the value and importance of systems back when you were buying … Continue reading

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Baking images with Packer & Pupistry

One of the common issues when building modern infrastructure-as-code style systems is that whilst automation is great, it also has a habit of failing at the worst possible time. There’s nothing quite like the fun of trying to autoscale only to find … Continue reading

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Recovering SW RAID with Ubuntu on Amazon AWS

Amazon’s AWS cloud service is a very popular and generally mature offering, but it does have it’s issues at times – in particular it’s storage options and limited debug facilities. When using AWS, you have three main storage options for … Continue reading

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Route53 with NamedManager 1.8.0

Just released NamedManager 1.8.0, my open source web-based DNS management tool. This release fixes some bugs with MySQL 5.6 and internationalized domain names, but also includes support for using Amazon AWS Route53 alongside the existing Bind9 support. Just add a … Continue reading

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Nginx, reverse proxies and DNS resolution

Nginx is a pretty awesome high performance web server and reverse proxy. It’s often used in conjunction with other HTTP servers such as Java/Tomcat and Ruby/Unicorn, as it allows static content to be served directly from disk by Nginx and … Continue reading

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ELBs & Corporate Proxies

Following on from yesterday’s ELB post, it’s worth noting that there’s another common scenario where you can trigger issues when accessing ELBs – many corporates enforce the use of an HTTP proxy for all outgoing traffic, sometimes transparently, other times … Continue reading

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Russian roulette with ELBs and CDNs

In my day job, I look after a number of websites, all of which generally make heavy use of CDNs (Content Distribution Networks) to offload traffic to edge nodes near to an end user’s device. In our case we use … Continue reading

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Ebook Debate

Lisa and I recently decided to purchase a Kindle – having first moved to Auckland and then Sydney, we were unable to take many books with us, something we both regretted – as the plan isn’t to settle in Sydney … Continue reading

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