Best Way to Speed Up Docker Development Workflow

Tung Nguyen · September 25, 2017 · 3 min read

The common advice to speeding up your Docker development workflow focuses on reducing your Docker image size. At the surface, the logic makes a lot of sense. By making your Docker images smaller, you win. With smaller image sizes, there are fewer bytes to pull down and push up to the registry, thus saving you a boatload of time. Smaller images = solution. What the advice does not take into account is a precious resource: developer’s time.

Read more →

Docker Image Layers Are Like Git Commits

Tung Nguyen · September 24, 2017 · 2 min read

One way to think about Docker image layers is to think of them as git commits. While the two are technically different, this article uses this analogy to point out an interesting commonality between both of them.

Read more →

3 SSH tips: Ssh-agent, Tunnel, and Escaping from the Dead

Tung Nguyen · September 21, 2017 · 5 min read

There are a ton of ssh tips out there, and I thought that I surface 3 of them. Here are 3 ssh tips that I’ve learned over the years. Hope you find them useful 🎉

Read more →

Lono Summary - Summarize CloudFormation Template

Tung Nguyen · September 18, 2017 · 2 min read

In the previous posts, we went over some jq tips with CloudFormation. We used jq to quickly summarize CloudFormation template parameters and resources. lono summary automates that process and makes the command short and sweet.

Read more →

Introduction to the lono import Command

Tung Nguyen · September 15, 2017 · 2 min read

Embarrassingly, I’ve been converting raw CloudFormation templates to lono CloudFormation templates manually. Probably one of the reasons why it’s been neglected is because this process is so simple, but it is ripe for automation. This should have been done this a long ago.

Read more →

Build Thor CLI Project in Under a Second

Tung Nguyen · September 14, 2017 · 2 min read

Update 9/5/2018: The video is old and demos the older version of the tool called thor_template. The new tool is called cli-template. I’ve updated the blog post but not the video. These two tools seem pretty cool too: http://piotrmurach.github.io/tty/: Thor based also. davetron5000.github.io/methadone/: Has it’s own CLI parser. Thanks @eashman for showing me the tools. In this post, we’ll build a CLI project that is based on Thor in under a second. The cli-template tool builds a fully functional CLI command based on Thor. The commands immediately work and there are even specs.

Read more →

How To Run Migrations on AWS ECS and Other One off Tasks

Tung Nguyen · September 12, 2017 · 3 min read

Once a developer came up to me and told me that he was ready to deploy, but the deploy required migrations be run. He asked me an innocent question, how should he run migrations. Embarrassingly, because we were still evolving our tooling for the new infrastructure, we did not have a process for this simple task. We came up with an ad-hoc process that was honestly pretty terrible. It went like this:

Read more →

Lono CloudFormation Framework Version 3 Release - Layering, Shared Variables, Nested Stacks, Format Detection, Custom Helpers, Source Name Convention, Settings Support

Tung Nguyen · August 28, 2017 · 5 min read

I’m excited to say that a ton of great features has been added to lono with this major version bump. At this point, lono has grown to become a framework for managing CloudFormation templates. Let jump right into it and cover the major improvements.

Read more →

BoltOps Tooling and Software Design Philosophy

Tung Nguyen · August 15, 2017 · 8 min read

Software is often more of an art form than it is a science. This is one of the reasons software tends to vary substantially between tools and developers. By following guidelines and design patterns though it can help keep the code consistent and clean. This allows the code to be understandable between engineers and allow them to move between tools efficiently. In this post, I’ll talk about what some of the best practices and software design patterns followed in the BoltOps tools.

Read more →

How to Customize AWS Elastic Beanstalk Environments

Tung Nguyen · July 22, 2017 · 7 min read

A common misconception is that Elastic Beanstalk is difficult to work with because it is not customizable. I fell into this trap myself when I first took a look at AWS Elastic Beanstalk. After working with AWS Elastic Beanstalk directly and looking at it more closely though, there are plenty of ways to customize Elastic Beanstalk. I’ll cover the main ways to customize AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments in this post.

Read more →

Under the Hood of AWS Elastic Beanstalk Part 2

Tung Nguyen · July 20, 2017 · 4 min read

This a continuation of the last post: Under the Hood of Elastic Beanstalk Part 1 We’ll go over the EB nginx setup for the docker container in this post.

Read more →

Under the Hood of AWS Elastic Beanstalk Part 1

Tung Nguyen · July 19, 2017 · 8 min read

Elastic Beanstalk, EB, is a bit of a magic box. I’d thought it would be good to poke around a little bit under the hood, see how things actually work and learn from it. Understanding just enough of how EB works is extremely helpful for debugging. For this example I’m using a “64bit Amazon Linux 2017.03 v2.7.0 running Docker 17.03.1-ce” EB solution stack.

Read more →

Jack and the Elastic Beanstalk - Easy Way to Manage AWS Elastic Beanstalk Environments

Tung Nguyen · July 05, 2017 · 7 min read

As with most AWS services, Elastic Beanstalk is great and simply require some tooling on top of the service to speed up the flow. This post covers the jack tool that be use to quickly create and manage Elastic Beanstalk environments.

Read more →

Speeding Up AWS Elastic Beanstalk's eb deploy

Tung Nguyen · June 29, 2017 · 10 min read

As I’ve covered in Jack and the Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Beanstalk is a great PaaS offering from AWS that allows developers to deploy and run their applications on EC2 instances. I been tinkering with a few different ways to speed up the eb deploy command from my local machine and was able to speed it up somewhat. Though honestly I was hoping for better results. I will detailed the results to show what I learned. Note, the project and all it’s files are available on GitHub at tongueroo/hi under the docker-cache branch.

Read more →

Ufo — Easily Build Docker Images and Deploy Containers to AWS ECS

Tung Nguyen · June 14, 2017 · 11 min read

Amazon EC2 Container Service, ECS, is an AWS service that provisions and manages Docker containers on a cluster of EC2 instances. As with most of AWS services, it is great and simply requires a little tooling wrapped around it to create a smooth flow. Ufo is a simple tool that makes building and shipping Docker containers to AWS ECS super easy.

Read more →

AutoScaling CloudFormation Template with Lono

Tung Nguyen · May 31, 2017 · 5 min read

In the last CloudFormation post, Generating CloudFormation Templates with Lono, the stack was intentionally designed simple to allow focus on learning and understanding CloudFormation basics. The stack was not that useful in real life. Today, I’ll walk through a CloudFormation template that is practical and useful for real life use cases: an AutoScaling App Tier.

Read more →

Lono Improvements v2.1.0

Tung Nguyen · May 23, 2017 · 5 min read

Recently, I’ve made some major improvements and updates to the lono tool. I thought it would be nice to provide a post detailing the changes for everyone.

Read more →

Continuously Generate CloudFormation Templates with Lono and Guard

Tung Nguyen · May 12, 2017 · 2 min read

When using lono if you sometimes forgot to regenerate the templates after making changes you can use lono with guard to never have to remember again.

Read more →

Generating Hundreds of CloudFormation Templates with Lono

Tung Nguyen · May 07, 2017 · 4 min read

Writing CloudFormation templates becomes difficult to manage once you start using it heavily. Whether it is one complicated template or multiple simple templates, maintaining the templates are a decent amount of work. This post covers a tool I wrote called lono to that manages and generates CloudFormation templates.

Read more →

AWS CloudFormation dry-run with lono cfn preview

Tung Nguyen · April 23, 2017 · 3 min read

I’ve covered lono cfn in Easily Manage CloudFormation Templates with lono cfn. After learning about AWS CloudFormation Change Sets, I was decided to add a dry-run mode to the lono tool. This dry-run command simplifies the usage of change sets to a single command: lono cfn preview 😁

Read more →

Easily Manage CloudFormation Templates - Introduction to Lono Template Generation

Tung Nguyen · April 13, 2017 · 4 min read

Lono is a tool that generates CloudFormation templates from smart ERB templates. With it, you can use variables and simplify managing your raw CloudFormation templates greatly.

Read more →

Why Generate CloudFormation Templates with Lono

Tung Nguyen · April 09, 2017 · 4 min read

Writing CloudFormation templates becomes difficult to manage once you start using it heavily. Whether it is one complicated template or multiple simple templates, maintaining the templates are a decent amount of work. This post talks about why I built a tool called lono to help manage and generate a large amount of CloudFormation templates.

Read more →

A Simple Introduction to AWS CloudFormation Part 4: Change Sets = Dry Run Mode

Tung Nguyen · April 07, 2017 · 5 min read

UPDATE 2022/8/12: Check out the improved CloudFormation Fundamentals Introductory Course. I am a big fan of AWS CloudFormation because it gives you the power to codify the infrastructure and provision it in a repeatable way. One thing that I’ve always wished that CloudFormation had was the ability to see the what changes would be applied ahead of time before hitting that update-stack button. Who wants to hit a big scary red button without knowing what is about to happen? I don’t.

Read more →

A Simple Introduction to AWS CloudFormation Part 3: Updating a Stack

Tung Nguyen · March 24, 2017 · 3 min read

UPDATE 2022/8/12: Check out the improved CloudFormation Fundamentals Introductory Course. In the last 2 stories, we created an EC2 instance and a Route53 record successfully with CloudFormation. We have yet to walk through the useful update-stack command though. In this post, we’ll use the 2 templates created in the first 2 posts to play around with the update-stack command.

Read more →

A Simple Introduction to AWS CloudFormation Part 2: EC2 Instance and Route53

Tung Nguyen · March 20, 2017 · 4 min read

UPDATE 2022/8/12: Check out the improved CloudFormation Fundamentals Introductory Course. This is a continuation of A Simple Introduction to AWS CloudFormation. We will build on top of the first simple CloudFormation template from Part 1, which provisions an EC2 instance and Security Group. We will add to it a Route53 record that points to the EC2 instance’s DNS public hostname. This demonstrates CloudFormation’s ability to “orchestrates” the components of the stack. CloudFormation will wait until the EC2 instance’s DNS public hostname is ready and then create the Route53 record pointing to it.

Read more →

A Simple Introduction to AWS CloudFormation Part 1: EC2 Instance

Tung Nguyen · March 06, 2017 · 8 min read

The easiest way to describe what CloudFormation is that it is a tool from AWS that allows you to spin up resources effortlessly. You define all the resources you want AWS to spin up in a blueprint document, click a button, and then AWS magically creates it all. This blueprint is called a template in CloudFormation speak.

Read more →

Setting Up Continuous Deployment to ECS on CircleCI

Tung Nguyen · March 03, 2017 · 5 min read

CircleCI is one of my goto hosted Continuous Integration, CI, providers. They make it very easy to quickly connect your GitHub account and set up CI. This story covers how to set up Continuous Deployment to ECS on CircleCI.

Read more →

Continuous Integration Provider Killer Debugging Feature: ssh login

Tung Nguyen · March 02, 2017 · 5 min read

I’m not the one who usually buys into the single killer feature hype. However, in the case of CircleCI they have a feature that blew my mind when I first saw it and still does today: ssh login. Being able to ssh into the machine to debug and poke around the environment is a godsend.

Read more →