I started writing here at the end of November in 2014. At that time I figured out how to setup Wordpress on an EC2 container in AWS and figure out how to secure it. From a general devops standpoint it was a great exercise for me to get better with AWS and just generally how you configure and lock down a website. As the years have gone on I have occasionally upgraded my container to the new long term stability releases of Ubuntu as they were released. Earlier this year I decided to do the same and upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu. Finally after keeping this container going for 6 years, I just got an error when trying to upgrade Ubuntu. I decided that that point I should just build a new container and migrate the blog over to it. It had been a couple of months, but I decided since I had the whole week off at Thanksgiving to undertake it at that time. As you can see now it has been successful as nothing looks different here.

My site was down for much of today as I finally took the plunge and rebuilt my image from ground up. This was something I had considered doing for some time now. The old site had been through a couple of ubuntu upgrades and was chugging along, but I always thought it would be good to do a fresh install. However I never really wanted to dump the time into it. Then I saw this article: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14284/amazon-offers-another-amd-epyc-powered-instance-t3a

I decided to upgrade my site to the new version of Ubuntu as I haven’t done that for a couple of years. It is always a nice thing to work on when I am on vacation as it is the sort of thing that I don’t really get around to normally when I am busy. What a pain that ended up being.

The Upgrade for the OS itself went very smoothly as it seems to normally do so for Ubuntu. But the upgrade to the newer version of PHP broke everything with my site. As I think back actually I think this happened last time when I went from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 as well and it jumped from php5 to php7. I ended up with about a 3 hour outage trying to sort everything out.

Introduction

I have been messing around with Google Kubernetes Engine for the last few weeks now (as we are deploying my new app to it) and I have to say overall I am impressed. There has been a lot of talk about Kubernetes for a while and at first I was wondering if it was just the next piece of tech being over-hyped like so many things. Having used it now for a month I can say I understand why people are so excited about it. The learning curve is steep, but once you climb it, you will really appreciate the power of the platform.

Recently I ported my domain hosting from Godaddy to Google Domains. My main reason for doing so was to save money. Domain names on Godaddy cost $3 more per year, plus they charge you for privacy on whois searches whereas Google includes that for free. It was a fairly easy process to transfer my domain names in, but configuring the DNS was a little bit weird as their zone file editing interface was different that godaddy’s. However I thought I had it all good and working so I was happy with my setup.