It’s been a while since my last post! Today, let’s explore how to use Certbot’s Route53 plugin to generate SSL certificates using certbot-dns-route53. Typically, Certbot verifies domain ownership by placing files on a public web server and checking for their existence. However, this approach doesn’t work for internal services that are inaccessible from the internet.
In the last blog I wrote I detailed how to send backups directly into S3. You might want to send backups to S3 rather than doing snapshots of your block devices in EC2 so that you can later download those backups and keep some form of your data in house. In this blog detail a basic script that does just that.
This blog post will go over the basics on getting automatic backups going from an AWS EC2 instance into an AWS S3 bucket. Storing your backups in S3 is a nice method because you get such good network performance keeping the data in AWS and then you can do a local backup to from the S3 data without effecting server performance or opening up any extra ports from their firewalls.
In an environment we often have files or configurations that we want to have on every node but then customize on specific nodes. For example a customized Ganglia gmond.conf file with differnt ports based on which cluster the machine belongs. The most basic method of doing this is with a giant case statement within the configuration file, but this gets unweildy at scale. A great solution for this is a resource collector. Resource collectors let you do a “find and replace” on an already defined resource. In the ganglia example it will let us define the gmond file once with default cluster settings, and then override it’s attributes for any node with a more specific cluster.