Devops

I’ve written in the past that this blog is a playground for me to try various tools and play with code around it. Jenkins has been my choice as the CI for it since the start, mostly since it was something I’m used to. However, I’ve also stated that running it on an old laptop with no real backups is a recipe for disaster. I have since rectified the issue by hiding the laptop under a box in a closet but that meant moving away from Jenkins to something that’s lighter and more portable....

I’ve recently had my birthday and as a gift decided to give myself a NUC. The intention here is that I could replace the old laptop running Jenkins and Grafana with something that’s a bit more silent and in a smaller form factor. Note that I’m not affiliated with any of the hardware manufacturers in any way shape or form. The planned change The laptop I’ve been using for Jenkins has become rather critical for this blog and a few side projects I’ve got....

I’ve written about the infrastructure behind this blog in a previous post and the major issue with it currently is the old laptop I have at home that’s running the Jenkins instance. I really have no way of backing it all up. I’ve asked around a bit and the reddit thread I’ve made pointed me towards moving it all towards Ansible. Since people are using Ansible at work I thought it would be appropriate for me to try it as well....

There are quite a few components to this blog now. There’s an AWS S3 bucket the blog gets served from, there’s a backend service responsible for the mouthful comments, there’s another instance of the service for the mouthful demo page, with another S3 bucket to serve the page for it. There’s also a yet unused service living in the same “cluster” as these two(It’ll get added to this blog soon™). There’s quite a few private github repositories that in unison with a Jenkins instance make this all work....

So I’ve had this raspberry pi 3 laying around in my closet for a year or a bit more now. While I thought I’d use it for automating something such as monitoring our plants for changes in soil moisture that did not come to fruition. With the start of this blog and the increase in tooling around it, I really needed something to run any sort of CI platform. I tend to host everything under AWS so that everything is under one roof....

I was looking for a way to add commenting functionality to the blog. The obvious candidate was Disqus but I did not choose it for 2 reasons: It’s too heavy(at around 200KB) It contains ads The weight itself would kill my quest for page speed instantly.So I set up to find a way to provide commenting ability on the blog. I knew this would probably lead me to a self-hosted solution but that did not scare me....