Tagged: aws

Tracing High Volume Services

This post was originally posted at engineering.curalate.com

We like to think that building a service ecosystem is like stacking building blocks. You start with a function in your code. That function is hosted in a class. That class in a service. That service is hosted in a cluster. That cluster in a region. That region in a data center, etc. At each level there’s a myriad of challenges.

From the start, developers tend to use things like logging and metrics to debug their systems, but a certain class of problems crops up when you need to debug across services. From a debugging perspective, you’d like to have a higher projection of the view of the system: a linearized view of what requests are doing. I.e. You want to be able to see that service A called service B and service C called service D at the granularity of single requests.… Read more

Scripting deployment of clusters in asgard

We use asgard at work to do deployments in both qa and production. Our general flow is to check in, have jenkins build, an AMI is created, and then … we have to manually go to asgard and deploy it. That sucks.

However, its actually not super hard to write some scripts to find the latest AMI for a cluster and prepare an automated deployment pipeline from a template. Here you go:

function asgard(){
  verb=$1
  url="https://my.asgard.com/us-east-1/$2"
  shift
  http ${VERB} --verify=no "$url" -b
}

function next-ami(){
  cluster=$1

  prepare-ami $cluster true | \
    jq ".environment.images | reverse | .[0]"
}

function prepare-ami(){
  cluster=$1

  includeEnv=$2

  asgard GET "deployment/prepare/${cluster}?deploymentTemplateName=CreateAndCleanUpPreviousAsg&includeEnvironment=${includeEnv}"
}

function get-next-ami(){
  cluster=$1

  next=`next-ami ${cluster} | jq ".id"`

  prepare-ami ${cluster} "false" | jq ".lcOptions.imageId |= ${next}"
}

function start-deployment(){
  cluster=$1
  payload=$2

  echo $payload | asgard POST "deployment/start/${cluster}"
}

The gist here is to

  • Find the next AMI image of a cluster
  • Get the prepared
… Read more