#community-projects (2020-05)

Sharing in case anybody has a need for this — https://github.com/masterpointio/terraform-aws-nuke-bomber

Been running it for a week or so and it’s doing the job I intended it to: keeping my AWS test account cleaned up and reducing costs!

A few tools for achieving pipeline independence that look promising, curious if anyone has any experience with either of ‘em: https://github.com/stepchowfun/toast and https://github.com/earthly/earthly

https://github.com/stepchowfun/docuum looks cool too

Toast talks about it

well that’s pretty nifty too, live example of using toast

too bad toast is a Rust app with the strangest release names I’ve ever seen

earthly it is I guess

strange release names, you say? I present Rundeck. 3.1.2: “mozzarella stick plum pushpin”

https://github.com/rundeck/rundeck/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

haha, I was looking more at the binary releases. I’ve looked at so many of them in tinkering with the cloudposse ‘packages’ app that it is hard for me to not want to judge a project if they use strange/non-standard release binary names in github releases.

Ahh, gotcha

“mozzarella stick plum pushpin” -> sounds like either an insult or an affectionate pet name for your significant other….

lol

I’d love to hear the conversation that leads to that being a pet name. It would have to be all kinds of bizarre and entertaining.

My production instances all have stuff like itchy elephant and others. I made the naming based on the original null label module yalll did. This was I can’t be blamed , terraform picked the name. ….. I am just waiting for someone to notice

I’m a huge fan of random naming when possible. I still cringe because the application developers randomized all the database names. It makes me very upset inside. It’s basically a random number string thing. To me it’s so completely reasonable and easier to manage if it’s simply used some pet names with a couple random alpha characters at the end.. so much more fun easy to find instances and still provides randomization

On the topic of run books I see rundeck mentioned. Is it a complicated or expensive undertaking to start using that? We have a bit of overload going on with the team but if it makes things easier then maybe it’s something worth looking at. I’m definitely not impressed with AWS SSM automation docs. Right now the equivalent runbook for us is a distributed repo that I include full of ASCII doc and scripts that gets copied to bastion boxes. I would like something that’s a little bit smoother for people to pick up though since I’ve not gotten anybody to start using it yet

I’m a big fan of rundeck. It’s got some rough edges (mostly around documentation) but they’ve been doing a good job of addressing those over the past year. I’ve centralized all of our cron jobs on rundeck so there’s alerting and logging built in, and it’s been really nice to be able to give engineers jobs that they can run for specific tasks.

We’re using the open source version, so aside from the machine it runs on there’s been no monetary cost. Getting it setup is pretty simple, their ACL is a bit tricky but they’ve made some huge improvements to the documentation about the ACL recently, and they have a command specifically for testing ACL policies.