fourteenislands.io

AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) with separate credentials & config files

Mon, 15 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Many of our customers’ cloud engineers and architects–but also consultants at Nordcloud supporting them–routinely work with fairly complex cloud environments made of dozens of Amazon Web services (AWS) accounts hosting many solutions.

Some of our customers–and ourselves–joined the 100+ accounts club long ago and, with more workloads migrated to AWS or new solutions built on the platform, challenges posed by the ever-increasing number of projects and potentially growing number of accounts are already a reality and are not going away anytime soon.

Static website hosting on AWS with S3, CloudFront & Lambda@Edge

Thu, 29 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In an earlier blog entry of this series about static website hosting on Amazon Web Services I wrote on the few mistakes Taxi 020–or rather Cabonline Technologies–made in handling their website’s infrastructure on AWS and how these mistakes could have been mitigated by leveraging Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) together with CloudFront.

I also wrote that I would come back to the infrastructure as code for static website hosting topic and elaborate on how it can be achieved with CloudFormation templates and CloudFormation stacks in AWS. Here are ready-to-use templates for three alternatives; from the simpler S3 only solution to the more advanced S3 with CloudFront and Lambda@Edge architecture.

Taking over taxi020.se, yet another S3 rookie mistake

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I was web browsing through the different taxi companies operating in Stockholm this morning when I eventually ended up on taxi020.se which responded with an HTTP 404 error. As I read the code and message for that error my search for waiting time at the airport terms and conditions got all of a sudden more interesting.

Taxi 020 merged with Sverigetaxi in 2016 and is now part of the Cabonline Group.

A new AWS region is coming to Stockholm, Sweden in 2018

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Unless you’ve been living under a rock since… last week, you’d know about the AWS region coming to the Nordics. The new EU (Stockholm) region will be operational in 2018 and will have three availability zones — as of today only the EU (Ireland) region also has three AZs in Europe — located in Katrineholm, Västerås and Eskilstuna.

Alexa, would you marry me?

Thu, 29 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It has been almost a month since I came back from the fifth edition of re:Invent—the main Amazon Web Services conference held in Las Vegas each year—and I take it upon myself to go ahead and bother you with a take-away post heavily influenced by my personal interest in the Internet of Things and, to a higher degree, smart home technologies.

What happens in Vegas...

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

… will most likely be available all over the interweb within seconds. I will therefore spare you (and me) all the low quality posts and will make the most of the sessions, after hours events and enjoy my first re:Invent instead.

Home Assistant, Docker and a Raspberry Pi

Sun, 24 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I decided it was time to deal with one of my 99 first world problems and simplify how I interact with the connected objects I tend to scatter around the house.

So I wasted a couple of hours searching the interweb - I obviously ended up watching Youtube videos too many times - and found a rather interesting open sourced project to help control these devices but also track their states and automate some: Home Assistant

Nginx reverse proxy, Docker and a Raspberry Pi

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

If you read my previous post you should know that fourteenislands.io is served by a Nginx web server (Docker) running on a Raspberry Pi. But what started as a sandbox environment to host a few static pages is getting busier everyday and I, among other things, needed to host a couple of RESTful web APIs on that Raspberry Pi (on a different domain name).

Amazon Web Services, nginx, Docker, Hugo and a Raspberry Pi

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Hosting a static webiste on a Raspberry Pi (RPi from now on) is quite straight forward. Serving that same website from a Dockerized Nginx HTTP server -on that same RPi- is a bit more interesting. Sure.

But what if the RPi decides to take the day off?

This post is mainly for students who attended one of my Architecting on AWS or System Operations on AWS sessions. It contains instructions, links to templates, tools and scripts to get started with Amazon Route 53 DNS failover between a primary site hosted on a RPi and a secondary site hosted on Amazon S3 & Amazon CloudFront. It is however not an exhaustive list of all the steps required for such a setup: use it at your own risk.

Altitude: widget for Connect IQ compatible Garmin devices

Wed, 17 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Altitude is a simple widget displaying the current altitude. The widget does not rely on the built-in barometric altimeter but retrieves the altitude from a third party elevation service (such as the Google Elevation API) based on the GPS position.

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate level sample exam questions and answers

Fri, 12 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam validates technical expertise in deployment, management, and operations on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include: deploying, managing, and operating scalable, highly available, and fault tolerant systems on AWS, migrating an existing on-premises application to AWS, implementing and controlling the flow of data to and from AWS, selecting the appropriate AWS service based on compute, data, or security requirements, identifying appropriate use of AWS operational best practices, estimating AWS usage costs and identifying operational cost control mechanisms. - Amazon Web Services

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate level sample exam questions and answers

Thu, 11 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam is intended for individuals with experience designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include: designing and deploying scalable, highly available, and fault tolerant systems on AWS; lift and shift of an existing on-premises application to AWS; ingress and egress of data to and from AWS; selecting the appropriate AWS service based on data, compute, database, or security requirements; identifying appropriate use of AWS architectural best practices; estimating AWS costs and identifying cost control mechanisms. - Amazon Web Services

be@t: Swatch Internet Time widget for Connect IQ compatible Garmin devices

Wed, 10 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Swatch Internet Time (or beat time) is a decimal time concept introduced in 1998 by the Swatch corporation as part of their marketing campaign for their line of “Beat” watches. Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided up into 1000 parts called “.beats”. Each .beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 (86.4) seconds. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing 248/1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes – Wikipedia

Puppet validator Jenkins plugin

Thu, 18 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

For the last couple of months I’ve mainly been working on automating our product delivery process. From building artifacts with Maven to packaging them as RPM together with generated Puppet modules for configuration, provisioning virtual machines through The Foreman the whole chain is now almost covered. I delivered a couple of Maven and Jenkins plugins along the way and the Puppet Validator Jenkins Plugin is a simplified version of one of the Jenkins plugins I wrote.

How to make good teams great, part two

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second part of How to make good teams great. First part is over there.

Feed your brain

In a rapidly changing environment - as the IT world is - you want to stay on top of things and you can’t only rely on techniques, languages, frameworks & technologies you played around with at school or in your current projects.

You must feed your brain with new ideas, new cool stuff (even old cool stuff by the way) and there are various places you can get brain food: conferences (if you or your company can afford it), bar camps & user groups (often free), brown bag sessions over lunch at the office, …

Book circle at work, my own little story

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If there was only one thing I wanted to take with me when I changed job in May 2011 it definitely was the book circles a colleague of mine was organizing twice a year. I simply love books and everything that come with them: knowledge, stories, smells, bookshelves, …

But as I started to set such an activity up at my new work place I realized it was much easier to just wait for an email announcing the upcoming titles, pick one up and then attend the sessions than actually make it happen.

As of today we are about to finish our second book and the third one is on the line. Time to reflect on my own little experience I suppose and share my dos and don’ts.

How to make good teams great, part one

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As we are implementing new development processes in the department I work for teams are going through a lot of changes. Attending Sven Peters’ (@svenpet) talk on 7 things: how to make good teams great at Jfokus was an obvious decision and I’m glad I went. It was really nice to hear that some of the actions we are taking right now have proven to be successful and appreciated by teams in other companies.

I’m not going to write about the 7 things at once but will break them down in two posts. Let’s start with It’s flow time and Report robot.

An overview of the NoSQL world

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A few sessions at the Disruptive Code 2010 were dedicated to the “NoSQL solutions” trendy topic and I was really looking forward —I have to admit— to what Adam Skogman from SpringSource and Eric Evans from Rackspace had to say on the subject.

High performance websites with ads [aftonbladet.se]

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Today was the first day of the disruptive code conference in Stockholm and I’m taking notes, a lot of notes. I unfortunately don’t have time to blog live from the event - too busy listening to some really good talks - so I am taking another approach: for the next couple of days, I’ll write about the sessions I have been attending.

Let’s get started then with notes I took during a session ran by Tobias Järlund CTO at AftonBladet, the biggest Swedish newspaper (so he claims at least) : high performance websites, with ads (don’t let third parties make you slow) which was based on AftonBladet’s experience and experiments on website, embedding third party ads, optimization.

Install libstdc++.so.5 on Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I recently got a new laptop and, as often in that case, had to install a fresh Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit (to replace a Windows XP) and all the software and tools I need as a developer. One of the software I had to install was the Tibco Enterprise Messaging Service (an implementation of the Java Message Service, JMS). The installation went fine (I had to deactivate all the visual effects in order to see the content of the dialog boxes though - under System > Preferences > Appearance) but I had some troubles starting EMS.

Recursively search files for a string with 'find'

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

When looking for a particular string, manually going through hundreds of files is out of the question! One single Unix command does it for you. $ find . -iname '*.*' -exec grep -nH 'Where is my string?' {} \;