terraform

I love not having to manage databases. Hosting it on your compute is guaranteed to be cheaper, but I don’t want to be constantly worrying about backups and database upgrade / maintenance. AWS offers managed databases, known as RDS. Mostly I use postgres, which works well for most use cases. (It’s also a given that - if you don’t really need NoSQL database, then don’t use it). If I spin up RDS postgres, I can reach it assuming I have set up the correct networking pathways....

I self hosted a lot of services, sometimes I try out a few apps that would get deleted within the same day. All this requires setting up CNAME for reverse-proxy (because I want to make sure there’s no funny reverse-proxy shenanigans going on, for future reference). I can always log into Cloudflare console and manually add CNAME entries, but this is getting too tiresome since all I really need is another CNAME with the same config as the rest of the CNAMEs - pointing to the same DNS for my homelab....

Updated 2023-02-20: update terraform code For frontends, if no server-side rendering is required, we can deploy it as a static site. If you already use GitHub, you might be familiar with GitHub Pages. One common use case is to deploy your personal landing page / blog via GitHub Actions. Interestingly enough, this might cause problems if you are working in a team. For example, if you are working on a UI change, and you need to have someone else approve the changes, they would need to build the site locally to do so....

Previously I wrote about setting up ECS task on fargate backend. But we can also use EC2 as backend too, in some cases where the workload is consistent, ie scaling is not required, since EC2 would be cheaper than fargate backend, even more so if you have reserved instance on top. There’s a few modifications from the fargate version to make it work with EC2 backend, if you are curious you can try to hunt those down 😎....

To deploy a web application, there are many ways to go about it. I could spin up a bare VM and set up the environment manually. To make things easier, I could have package the app into docker image. But this still means I have to “update” the app manually if I add changes to it. Things would be super cool if: after I push the changes to master branch, the app would be deployed automatically....