+++*

Symbolic Forest

A homage to loading screens.

Blog

Repetition

In which we get annoyed with AWS

The problem with writing a diary entry every day is that most weeks of the year, five days out of seven are work. It’s hard to write about work and make it interesting and different every day; and also not write about anything too confidential.

Writing about work itself would quickly become pretty dull, I fear, however interesting I tried to make it. Today, I wrestled with the Amazon anaconda. Amazon have a product called Elastic Beanstalk, which is a bit like a mini virtual data centre for a single website. You pick a virtual image for your servers, you upload a zip file with your website in it, and it fires up as many virtual servers as you like, balances the load between them, fires up new servers when load is high and shuts down spare ones when load is low. If you’re not careful it’s a good way to let people DDoS your credit card, because you pay for servers by the hour, but all-in-all it works quite well. The settings are simple, but deliberately fairly straightforward: how powerful a server do you want to run on, how many of them do you need at different times of the day, and a few other more esoteric and technical knobs to tweak. Elastic Beanstalk isn’t so much a product in itself, as a wrapper around lots of other Amazon Web Services products that you can use separately: virtual servers, server auto-scaling and inbound load balancing. The whole idea is to make tying those things together in a typical use-case a really easy thing to do, rather than having to roll your own each time and struggling with the hard bits. The only thing that’s specifically Elastic Beanstalk is the control panel and configuration on top of it, which keeps track of what you want installed on your Elastic Beanstalk application and controls all the settings of the individual components. You can still access the individual components too, if you want to, and you can even change their settings directly, but doing so is usually a Bad Idea as then the Elastic Beanstalk control layer will potentially get very confused.

Today, I found I couldn’t update one of our applications. A problem with an invalid configuration. Damn. So I went to fix the configuration - but it was invalid. So I couldn’t open it, to fix it. It was broken, but I couldn’t fix it because it was broken. Oh.

That’s how exciting work is. One line of work held up, whilst I speak to Ops, get the broken Elastic Beanstalk replaced from scratch with a working one. In theory I could have done it myself, but our Ops chap doesn’t really like his part of the world infringed unilaterally.

The woman at the desk opposite me is on a January diet. One of those diets that involves special milkshakes and lots of water all day. Personally, I’d rather have real food.