Boring is Beautiful!

Define Custom Domains in AWS SAM with ACM Certificates

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 11:38:34 +0400

Intro

AWS Serverless Application Model or SAM for short is an Opensource dev tool for building serverless applications on AWS. SAM is a bunch of templates that help defining Infrastructure as Code for serverless applications. Think CloudFormation with shortcuts!

I was recently working on a serverless app and had to deploy an API gateway with SSL Certs. The domain was hosted on Route53 and that means all of this can be managed using SAM.

DevOps is Hard. And no, its not just about the Tools!

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 10:19:39 +0400

DevOps is Hard. And no, its not just about the Tools!

DevOps is a word that gets thrown around way too much in the software development universe. Tons of promises made - lightning-fast releases, increased collaboration, improved cost efficiency, and boy! Are they the right hook for management!

The path to success as and with a DevOps team is however this long winding road choked with traffic - like a Monday morning on the outer ring road in Bangalore, and just for fun, the governor is also travelling with you!

Dockerizing your rails app - Only the gotchas!

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 17:30:00 +0000

Containerisation is all the rage these days with every cloud provider offering some way or the other to deploy and manage containers. Running your Ruby on Rails application on a containerised platform will let you not only save, it also lets you get your changes faster to your end users. Are you doing it right or missing the obvious???

You should Always start your cloud journey with AWS

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 05:15:00 +0000

There are a ton of cloud providers around town. Starting from the mom and pop shops, to co-located Data center providers to full blown cloud infra providers. For a beginner, there’s absolutely no shortage of options to start off with. In fact, it will overwhelm a beginner to the point of confusion and frustration.

Projects and Talks

Sun, 14 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I love talking about tech in meetups and conferences. I’ve got some of them here:

I conducted a level 100 Workshop for the AWS Usergroup in Dubai. Slides from the workshop are here:

My “boring” talk at AWS Kochi In Dec, 2023 about building Engineering Velocity using DevOps.

By far the largest Audience I’ve interacted with - A talk at AWS Community day Kochi on how we connected 10000 cars to the AWS cloud at Zoomcar.

How to Remote - Part 1 of n...

Wed, 18 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I just scribbled this down since I’ve been asked multiple times on how to be efficient when working from home. Here’s some tips that will hopefully help you:

Have a separate place to work. Have a separate place to sleep / eat / relax. Do not mix them up. Everyone makes the mistake of working from their beds. Stop that!
Have specific times to work. Dont go into this never-ending spree of working because you have a stable internet connection and uninterrupted power. Start at a fixed time, STOP at a fixed time. Note the emphasis on Stop.

Go Remote or Wind up!

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The whole #covid19 pandemic is an amazing opportunity to gear up for the next level.

For every single organization looking to hire for the best employees out there, here’s just 2 words: Go Remote!

Treat this international situation as an opportunity to hire remotely. And Here’s why: A person who says he / she will work remote has already ticked off a lot of boxes -

They’re self motivated
They learn on their own
They can work with a broad requirement and dig around to get work done.

These are some of the main qualities that you look for when you hire. All you need to do is hire a person ready to work remotely, enable them and trust that work WILL BE DONE.

Sassc nightmares with Docker

Tue, 04 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We run our infra on AWS Fargate. This means docker images. Our docker image is based on debian buster packaged with Ruby 2.6.5.

Of late, we’ve had crashes on and off everytime the container boots up. They all have the same symptom: Rails tries to load the sassc gem and it barfs!

The biggest problem is the unpredictability of the crash. It might happen.

It might not!

If you run rails and make use of the sassc gem which you most probably will do, you might run into a problem when the gem is loaded:

Secure your DNS Queries

Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As part of my home server setup (which warrants a post very soon), I’ve setup a DNSCrypt resolver. This was heavily inspired by Abhay (Nemo) who’s setup a DNSCrypt resolver on Digital Ocean in Bangalore.

My server takes the second number for DNSCrypt resolvers in Bangalore, INDIA.

Here’s the configuration for the tech guys and hence the TLDR;:

ProviderKey A6FA:B764:A3D7:A1C7:208D:11DA:0184:8602:81A5:0887:BC42:3DDE:FD33:CF77:0B7A:EFFF
ResolverAddress 106.51.128.78:4434
ProviderName 2.dnscrypt-cert.qag.me

The server does not respond to insecure DNS requests on port 53. This means you’ll need to setup either Unbound / dnscrypt-proxy to get this going. I’ll put up a post on how to set this up shortly.

Starting Off 2018

Sun, 07 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

2018 has started off slow, but steady. I’ve promised myself to NOT set any resolutions to keep up / follow for 2018. I’ve also promised myself to concentrate on one thing and ONE thing only.

Get things done. One thing at a time.

Well, in that regard, I’ve finally gotten around to setting up my Home server - It now hosts the following:

My personal document store
My mail server / MX (Huge shout out to the ACT tech team for getting this done quick) - separate blog post coming in soon
My web server + test bed

Things to come soon:

A rant on IT

Wed, 20 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The IT industry needs Bouncers

A doctor is supposed to invest time as a student, work as an apprentice and then gain a post-graduation to be able to get into an operation theatre and perform surgery on a human. To top it all, they’re required to swear by an Oath to protect human lives and act with compassion.

Why is it then that a an engineer is not required to undergo any of this jugglery? See the “jugglery” derogative there?

No More Facebook

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I got off facebook today. My account isnt active anymore. There’s a point to which you can stand those ToS changes that Facebook makes and then breaks for their benefit. To have random ads showing up in my feed is just not worth anymore! And sitting there isnt giving me any money either.

I’m no big Security and Privacy advocate but if Facebook knows when you’re taking a leak, you should definitely be concerned!

And then we rode...

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Day one - Tour of Karnataka .

What a day! I couldn’t be happier! 150 km covered in just over 7 hours of riding…

The usual knee pain, but in all an amazing ride.

Idli and vada did not help once again… And I had to resort to energy bars to push to lunch point at 119km.

The heat almost killed me post lunch.. Hassan should be renamed HAS-ONLY-SUN. Chennai would lose hands down in heat wave comparisons.

Cycling and the Tour of Karnataka

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:30:00 +0000

I moved to Bangalore in July this year and the first thing I realised that there was no way I was prepared to share my paychecks with Uber. There was no way I was going to stay stuck in traffic for 2 hours in each direction either.

The only option left, that I’d put on the back burner was Cycling. So I went ahead, spoke to a few friends, met the inspiring Mr. Chethan Ram, and bought myself a Marin.

About Me

Sat, 20 Jun 2015 14:02:37 +0200

My Name is Ashwin, known around the internet as cruisemaniac. I am a DevOps, Infra and Cloud engineering leader who likes to help people build, migrate and get going with their technology solutions on major cloud providers like AWS, Azure and GCP. I love working with tech - I run my own DNS and email servers.

Work

I work as a Senior DevOps engineer with the Autonomous Robotics Research Center at the Technology Innovation Institute.

Git vulnerability announced! Upgrade your git client

Fri, 19 Dec 2014 12:20:00 +0000

Git just announced a new release (ver 2.2.1) of the git client that fixes a vulnerability affecting all git users on Windows and Mac OSX operating systems. Github says this:

The vulnerability concerns Git and Git-compatible clients that access Git repositories in a case-insensitive or case-normalizing filesystem. An attacker can craft a malicious Git tree that will cause Git to overwrite its own .git/config file when cloning or checking out a repository, leading to arbitrary command execution in the client machine. Git clients running on OS X (HFS+) or any version of Microsoft Windows (NTFS, FAT) are exploitable through this vulnerability. Linux clients are not affected if they run in a case-sensitive filesystem.

Git for Ages 4 and Up

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 01:45:00 +0000

Its a long video at a little over 1.5 hours but there is no better resource on the internet that can explain Git like how this video does!

Get Vagrant running with berkshelf on Mavericks

Tue, 09 Sep 2014 19:00:00 +0000

So, here I was trying to setup Vagrant on my Mac. Everything went fine till the vagrant up command and boom:

myfirstvagrantproject $ vagrant up
Bringing machine 'projectname' up with 'virtualbox' provider...
==> projectname: The cookbook path '/Users/cruisemaniac/.berkshelf/projectname/vagrant/berkshelf-20140909-37664-1gf5t34-projectname' doesn't exist. Ignoring...
Updating Vagrant's berkshelf: '/Users/cruisemaniac/.berkshelf/projectname/vagrant/berkshelf-20140909-37664-1gf5t34-projectname'
RuntimeError: Couldn't determine Berks version: #<Buff::ShellOut::Response:0x00000101040360 @exitstatus=1, @stdout="", @stderr="/Users/cruisemaniac/.rbenv/versions/2.1.2/lib/ruby/2.1.0/rubygems/dependency.rb:298:in `to_specs': Could not find 'berkshelf' (>= 0) among 56 total gem(s) (Gem::LoadError)\n\tfrom /Users/cruisemaniac/.rbenv/versions/2.1.2/lib/ruby/2.1.0/rubygems/dependency.rb:309:in `to_spec'\n\tfrom /Users/cruisemaniac/.rbenv/versions/2.1.2/lib/ruby/2.1.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_gem.rb:53:in `gem'\n\tfrom /Users/cruisemaniac/.rbenv/versions/2.1.2/bin/berks:22:in `<main>'\n">

I knew vagrant liked chef_solo and berkshelf to assist in the scripts that handle provisioning the VM. So I went ahead and installed the gems before starting out with the vagrant install.

Homebrew and MySQL

Fri, 05 Sep 2014 17:00:00 +0000

I was recently trying to setup MySQL with Homebrew and noticed that the mysql server that brew installed was not playing nice with the existing setups.

The solution is to wipe out any existing MySQL installs you’ve got on your mac and redo everything from scratch with brew. This makes the mysql installed from Brew your main installation.

Read up on this blogpost that details the sequence. 5 minutes, a few commands and all is hanky-panky in mysql land :-)

People Forget

Sun, 22 Jun 2014 02:00:00 +0000

The most important offering at a restaurant is not the food. Its the experience while at the restaurant that makes a person go visiting again. Or swoon about it on social media! Good food is just, “so to speak”, the icing on the cake!

Thats why I pay you a premium for the experience!

When you forget something as essential as a customer’s order, the tastiest of dishes at your establishment takes a back seat over a spoilt evening for the people at the table!

I Love Jekyll I Hate Jekyll

Tue, 13 May 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Bad title for a post but thats how my relationship with the [jekyll][1] static site generator stands.

I love it:

It just lets me blog - no shitty admin console, no extra jazz, just keyboard noise –> blog post with some very simple magic in between.
it serves static html - no wordpress security headaches, no server load problems, instant load times given that i load off an SSD on my [host][2]¹.
no db - that much more faster, that much less software to setup and get going
markdown - the new posterchild of content creation. plain text with intelligence!

I hate it:

Six Essential Tips for App Developers

Mon, 28 Apr 2014 06:00:00 +0000

An interesting infographic from google. Simple tips, interesting numbers.

Source

Here's to 2013 and a great 2014

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 12:30:00 +0000

2013 was an amazing year in many respects! Worked on more things than before - learnt a ton of new things…

Infrastructure management - I got my hands dirty with something i’ve always wondered what it was. Knowing how to organize your infrastructure, sizing, planning, creating new machines, the cloud and yes, Amazon EC2 as well!

Got better at automating software delivery - helped improve processes at work! A tiny little tool that I wrote has run with 0 downtime for the last year! Okay… there was a downtime of about 5 minutes when the root password expired :-P

Nginx HTTP Caching and Compression

Sat, 07 Dec 2013 11:00:00 +0000

This is a blog post for posterity - I’m sure I’ll forget how I did this and will go hunting again! and I must definitely be the last guy on the planet to be setting up nginx!

Nginx is pretty fast in itself. I use jekyll to power this site. So, when you’re reading this article, all the data is coming right off the hard disk - No databases, no queries, no lookups - simple fopen, read, stdout…

Jekyll and Windows Code Pages

Sat, 07 Dec 2013 03:30:00 +0000

####Prelude I recently moved my blog over to Jekyll! Thanks to a black friday deal over at Digital Ocean, I got my hands on a vps that I dont have to pay for the next 10 months…

So, the first thing I did was to setup my almost dead in the corner blog using Jekyll, something that I’ve been meaning to do for over a year now.. And unlike a lot of people using Jekyll on *nix and OSX based systems, I was forced to setup Ruby 1.9.3 on Windows 7 and play around with it…

Fat controller or Fat model???

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 23:32:54 +0000

When coding up an app using the MVC model, how much of logic do you actually code up in the controller?

The controller’s job in an MVC setup is to pick up action requests from the user acting on the View, pass them to the model for data manipulation and pull out the new view to show to the user.

Now, the question in my mind is: How much of logic do you actually throw into the controller?

Draft - Go Write

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:58:00 +0000

Represent your brand

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:11:56 +0000

On Writing E-Mails

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A handy Unix shell tip

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Dennis Ritchie

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 08:46:00 +0000

To the man who defined a lot of what we today take for granted in computing! R.I.P.

As a side note, the K&R book still sends shivers down my spine when I look back at my days as a computer engineering student.