My current company is making a big push to deploy our flagship app in the cloud around the world. This is a suggestion I recently made in a meeting regarding “How” we should start and how we can prevent making the same mistakes we make today in our physical infrastructure.
AWS Dashbaord With Python, Boto and Flask
So I actually started working on a small little dashboard for AWS for another project I am working on in the office; however I decided to fork it and make this into a dashboard which could be used by many other people to get a single view of their AWS environment. Besides that I also wanted to create a small way to detect unattached ebs volumes, unattached elastic IPs, and upcoming events for your EC2 instances. Hopefully as time permits I can grow this small project into a very powerful tool for other people to use.
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Website Scraping With Python and Beautiful Soup
So a buddy of mine asked me to help him write a shell script which can scrape content from a website and put it into a mongodb database. I didn’t really feel like writing a shell script to do that since I figured it would be a huge pain in the a**. So I decided I would try it with Python. After some research I stumbled upon beautiful Soup. This actually turned out to be pretty easy and in a few moments I had a script which could scrape the MegaMillions website, grab the date, winning numbers, and mega number from every drawing and put that info into a mongodb database.
Checking The Status Of Your ELB With Zabbix
In my current environment (not for this blog lol) I leverage multiple ELBs to provide multi availability zone HA. We also use Zabbix to monitor our EC2 environment (in a previous post I extended the Mikoomi EC2 Zabbix plugin) so I figured I would create a way to have Zabbix alert on outages with backend nodes configured in our ELBs.
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Puppet 3.0 Upgrade Experience
So on Monday in the middle of the day all of my systems upgraded to 3.0. Before I go to far into this blog I want to explain that this was my fault. The puppet module that controls the version of puppet which is installed on each of my clients is set to “ensure => latest”. Obviously this forced an upgrade of my entire environment. This was very much a lack of up front thinking on my part. That being said I’d like to point out a few things other users might encounter when upgrading.