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Tools

Category: Tools

All posts about Tools.

Introducing Terraspace: The Terraform Framework header image

Introducing Terraspace: The Terraform Framework

Tung Nguyen Tung Nguyen · August 22, 2020 · 7 min read
Terraspace is a Terraform framework. It provides an organized structure, conventions over configurations, keeps your code DRY, and adds convenient tooling. It makes it easier and more fun to work with Terraform.
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Introducing Kubes: The Kubernetes Deployment Tool header image

Introducing Kubes: The Kubernetes Deployment Tool

Tung Nguyen Tung Nguyen · August 15, 2020 · 3 min read
Kubes is a deployment tool that makes it easier and more fun to work with Kubernetes. Kubes automates 3 main steps. Build a Docker image. Create the YAML files that declare the Kubernetes resources. Run kubectl apply to create the resources on the cluster. It boils everything down to one single command: kubes deploy
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AWS CloudFormation Declarative Infrastructure Code Tutorial header image

AWS CloudFormation Declarative Infrastructure Code Tutorial

Tung Nguyen Tung Nguyen · February 14, 2018 · 12 min read
If you are working with AWS heavily, you should look into a powerful tool called CloudFormation. Taking the time to learn CloudFormation is an investment that is easily returned to you in the form of powerful automation. In this guide, we’ll provide a gentle introduction to CloudFormation, and by the end, you’ll have the skills to start using it in your own AWS workflow.
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Best Way to Speed Up Docker Development Workflow header image

Best Way to Speed Up Docker Development Workflow

Tung Nguyen 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.
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Docker Image Layers Are Like Git Commits header image

Docker Image Layers Are Like Git Commits

Tung Nguyen 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.
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Lono Summary - Summarize CloudFormation Template header image

Lono Summary - Summarize CloudFormation Template

Tung Nguyen 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.
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Summarize CloudFormation Required Parameters with jq header image

Summarize CloudFormation Required Parameters with jq

Tung Nguyen Tung Nguyen · September 17, 2017 · 1 min read
Shortly after the last video CloudFormation Templates and jq Tips, I wanted to know what the required parameters in a CloudFormation template were. This is also an easy task with jq. I’ll show you how to use jq to quickly summarize the required and optional parameters in a CloudFormation template in this post. It’s a one-liner 😁
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Summarize CloudFormation Resources with jq Tip header image

Summarize CloudFormation Resources with jq Tip

Tung Nguyen Tung Nguyen · September 16, 2017 · 4 min read
I’ll go over a useful way to summarize CloudFormation templates resources with jq. This is useful when you are looking at a CloudFormation template and trying to understand it. We’ll download an example CloudFormation template and use run through some useful jq commands summarize the resources defined in a CloudFormation template. Note, I’ll only show the output that is useful for understanding.
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JSON to YAML One Liner header image

JSON to YAML One Liner

Tung Nguyen Tung Nguyen · September 16, 2017 · 1 min read
I don’t remember exactly where I got these one-liners from anymore. It’s been in my expander for a while. Here are useful oneliners to convert JSON to YAML and vice versa.
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Introduction to the lono import Command header image

Introduction to the lono import Command

Tung Nguyen 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.
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Build Thor CLI Project in Under a Second header image

Build Thor CLI Project in Under a Second

Tung Nguyen 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.
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How To Run Migrations on AWS ECS and Other One off Tasks header image

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

Tung Nguyen 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:
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Gentle Introduction to How AWS ECS Works with Example Tutorial header image

Gentle Introduction to How AWS ECS Works with Example Tutorial

Tung Nguyen Tung Nguyen · September 09, 2017 · 10 min read
ECS is the AWS Docker container service that handles the orchestration and provisioning of Docker containers. This is a beginner level introduction to AWS ECS. I’ve seen some nightmare posts and some glowing reviews about the ECS service, so I knew it was going to interesting to get my hands dirty and see what ECS was all about.
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AWS ECS Terms Introduction Tutorial header image

AWS ECS Terms Introduction Tutorial

Tung Nguyen Tung Nguyen · September 08, 2017 · 2 min read
Task Definition — This a blueprint that describes how a docker container should launch. If you are already familiar with AWS, it is like a LaunchConfig except instead it is for a docker container instead of an instance. It contains settings like exposed port, docker image, CPU shares, memory requirement, the command to run and environmental variables. Task — This is a running container with the settings defined in the Task Definition. It can be thought of as an “instance” of a Task Definition. Service — Defines long-running tasks of the same Task Definition. This can be one running container or multiple running containers all using the same Task Definition. Cluster — A logic group of EC2 instances. When an instance launches the ecs-agent software on the server registers the instance to an ECS Cluster. This is easily configurable by setting the ECS_CLUSTER variable in /etc/ecs/ecs.config described here. Container Instance — This is just an EC2 instance that is part of an ECS Cluster and has docker and the ecs-agent running on it.
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BoltOps Tooling and Software Design Philosophy header image

BoltOps Tooling and Software Design Philosophy

Tung Nguyen 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.
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How to Customize AWS Elastic Beanstalk Environments header image

How to Customize AWS Elastic Beanstalk Environments

Tung Nguyen 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.
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Speeding Up AWS Elastic Beanstalk's eb deploy header image

Speeding Up AWS Elastic Beanstalk's eb deploy

Tung Nguyen 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.
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Ufo — Easily Build Docker Images and Deploy Containers to AWS ECS header image

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

Tung Nguyen 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.
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AutoScaling CloudFormation Template with Lono header image

AutoScaling CloudFormation Template with Lono

Tung Nguyen 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.
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Lono Improvements v2.1.0 header image

Lono Improvements v2.1.0

Tung Nguyen 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.
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Generating Hundreds of CloudFormation Templates with Lono header image

Generating Hundreds of CloudFormation Templates with Lono

Tung Nguyen 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.
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AWS CloudFormation dry-run with lono cfn preview header image

AWS CloudFormation dry-run with lono cfn preview

Tung Nguyen 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 😁
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Why Generate CloudFormation Templates with Lono header image

Why Generate CloudFormation Templates with Lono

Tung Nguyen 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.
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A Simple Introduction to AWS CloudFormation Part 4: Change Sets = Dry Run Mode header image

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

Tung Nguyen 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.
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A Simple Introduction to AWS CloudFormation Part 3: Updating a Stack header image

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

Tung Nguyen 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.
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A Simple Introduction to AWS CloudFormation Part 2: EC2 Instance and Route53 header image

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

Tung Nguyen 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.
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A Simple Introduction to AWS CloudFormation Part 1: EC2 Instance header image

A Simple Introduction to AWS CloudFormation Part 1: EC2 Instance

Tung Nguyen 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.
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