Nuts and Bolts

UFO and ECS Fargate Introduction Tutorial

Tung Nguyen · July 11, 2018 · 6 min read

This is an introductory guide to ufo, an ECS deployment tool, with AWS Fargate. Ufo helps you deploy Docker images to AWS ECS. With Fargate, you can run docker containers without having to manage servers, for an interesting “serverless” option.

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UFO ECS Deployment Tool Introduction

Tung Nguyen · July 06, 2018 · 5 min read

This is an introductory guide to ufo, an ECS deployment tool. Ufo helps you deploy Docker images to AWS ECS quickly. One pretty neat thing about ufo is that it provides direct access and control to the ECS Task Definition. So you can customize your ECS container options to your heart’s content. We’ll also talk about some of the resources that ufo creates.

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UFO Version 4 Release: Load Balancer Support

Tung Nguyen · July 05, 2018 · 5 min read

There are some pretty big changes for ufo version 4. Here’s what’s new: Fuller CLI Toolkit Commands Load Balancer Support Updated Tutorial Guide Security Groups Improved Fargate Support Extra Env Support CloudFormation Implementation Upgrade Guide

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Heroku vs ECS Fargate vs EC2 On-Demand vs EC2 Spot Pricing Comparison

Tung Nguyen · April 22, 2018 · 5 min read

Recently upgraded ufo to add support for ECS Fargate. As part of this, I had a chance to look at the pricing for Fargate. Found out that ECS Fargate’s pricing is competitive to Heroku’s offering. The pricing makes a lot of sense because they offer a similar value proposition. We do not have to manage the servers.

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Docker Intro Tutorial: Common Commands Crash Course

Tung Nguyen · April 19, 2018 · 9 min read

Docker is kind of like git in a sense that there are only a few commands to learn to for it be useful. This tutorial focuses on the docker commands that I find myself most commonly use. This article assumes that you have a general idea of what docker is and have it installed and set up already. Hopefully, it serves as handy reference or cheatsheet for useful common docker commands.

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AWS Step Functions Benefits and Disadvantages

Tung Nguyen · April 17, 2018 · 2 min read

Looking into AWS Step Functions. Here are some initial thoughts. AWS Step Functions involves translating your logic into a declarative form. In this sense, it’s like CloudFormation. For some, the change in logical constructs can be a bit daunting at first. Here are some benefits and disadvantages.

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AWS CloudFormation Declarative Infrastructure Code Tutorial

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

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

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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3 SSH tips: Ssh-agent, Tunnel, and Escaping from the Dead

Tung Nguyen · September 21, 2017 · 5 min read

There are a ton of ssh tips out there, and I thought that I surface 3 of them. Here are 3 ssh tips that I’ve learned over the years. Hope you find them useful 🎉

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Lono Xgraph - Visualizing the CloudFormation Template Dependency Graph

Tung Nguyen · September 20, 2017 · 2 min read

It can be difficult to understand the CloudFormation resources and their dependencies when working with a complicated CloudFormation template. We’ll run through some commands to try to help understand their dependencies.

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Lono Summary - Summarize CloudFormation Template

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

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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JSON to YAML One Liner

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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Summarize CloudFormation Resources with jq Tip

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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Introduction to the lono import Command

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

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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AWS Console Menu Shortcuts Tip

Tung Nguyen · September 13, 2017 · 1 min read

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

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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How AWS VPC Works Intro

Tung Nguyen · September 12, 2017 · 1 min read

I’ll provide a basic introduction to the mysterious VPC world. I’ll explain terms using various diagrams. We’ll also build a simple VPC network out manually to help understand VPCs.

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