Jenkins and SCM Sync

So if you plan on scaling out Jenkins with slaves and the like you’ll probably want to ensure your configuration is kept someone secure, handily there’s a plugin for that.

Jenkins SCM Sync – which to be fair I have a bit of a love hate relationship with and since building up a new Jenkins server last week hasn’t got any better, the config loaded in fine, but then would error on every save / change.

Continue reading “Jenkins and SCM Sync”

AWS and a bit of Slack

So now that we’re able to have code deploying into AWS and notifications from Jenkins into Slack it would make sense if we could check what’s happening with Elastic Beanstalk when the code is deployed (and also get a heads up of any issues with our environments.)

So Lambda and SNS to the rescue, here’s what you need:

This post about Lambda and SNS as well as this updated code, which gets a mention in the comments.

Amazon Web Services (Jenkins)

Right so we have our handy services Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with access via OpenVPN (and the awesome Viscosity OSX VPN Client) now we need to start adding useful things into it.

(See this blog post for info)

For me the next step was looking at how we could automate deployments using our own tool chain, part of the reason we are looking at AWS is to get a bit more flexibility and also the benefits of greater automation.  We’ve already had success using BitBucket -> Codeship -> Heroku as a work flow to make our code visible and available in readily shareable environment, and it took < 5 minutes to get it up and running ;-)

Continue reading “Amazon Web Services (Jenkins)”

Auto Start / Stop servers FTW

So one of the things I’ve always liked about AWS^WCloud based services is the ability to just spin up development instances and use them, however I’m generally working for between 8 – 10 hours a day and not so often at weekends, but during those hours my servers are running and not doing much, BUT as they are racking up costs (ok so not too much for a t1.micro but the point still stands) and I knew of companies shutting down unused servers during the night and weekends and thought I should give that a go.

So the first attempt at this uses a scheduled data pipeline to run an AWSCLI command to either stop or start servers, sadly due to the lack of complexity in the scheduler in the console (please AWS just put in a text box so I can add in a crontab line) the servers get started and stopped at weekends too, but I’ve now reduced the daily uptime by 14 hours a day, 98 hours a week or 5096 hours a year (you get the point) actually if you take weekends into a count it’s even more than this.

And to do this took 10 minutes thanks to this handy tutorial provided by AWS.