Tag: web hosting

Top 13 Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Best Practices

Cloud Academy Blog goes over top 13 Amazon VPC best practices – particularly good for those just starting up with the platform.  The article discusses the following:

  1. Choosing the Proper VPC Configuration for Your Organization’s Needs
  2. Choosing a CIDR Block for Your VPC Implementation
  3. Isolating Your VPC Environments
  4. Securing Your Amazon VPC Implementation
  5. Creating Your Disaster Recovery Plan
  6. Traffic Control and Security
  7. Keep your Data Close
  8. VPC Peering
  9. EIP – Just In Case
  10. NAT Instances
  11. Determining the NAT Instance Type
  12. IAM for Your Amazon VPC Infrastructure
  13. ELB on Amazon VPC

Overall, it’s a very handy quick list.

StackOverflow: Docker vs. Vagrant, with project authors’ comments

There is this discussion over at StackOverflow: Should I use Vagrant or Docker for creating an isolated environment? It attracted the attention of the authors of both projects (as well as many other smart people).  Read the whole thing for interesting insights into what’s there now and what’s coming.  If you’d rather have a summary, here it is:

The short answer is that if you want to manage machines, you should use Vagrant. And if you want to build and run applications environments, you should use Docker.

504 Gateway Timeout error on Nginx + FastCGI (php-fpm)

504

“504 Gateway Timeout” error is a very common issue when using Nginx with PHP-FPM.  Usually, that means that it took PHP-FPM longer to generate the response, than Nginx was willing to wait for.  A few possible reasons for this are:

  • Nginx timeout configuration uses very small values (expecting the responses to be unrealistically fast).
  • The web server is overloaded and takes longer than it should to process requests.
  • The PHP application is slow (maybe due to database behind it being or slow).

There is plenty advice online on how to troubleshoot and sort these issues.  But when it comes down to increasing the timeouts, I found such advice to be scattered, incomplete, and often outdated.  This page, however, has a good collection of tweaks.  They are:

  1. Increase PHP maximum execution time in /etc/php.ini: max_execution_time = 300
  2. Increase PHP-FPM request terminate timeout in the pool configuration (/etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf): request_terminate_timeout = 300
  3. Increase Nginx FastCGI read timeout (in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf): fastcgi_read_timeout 300;

Also, see this Stack Overflow thread for more suggestions.

P.S.: while you are sorting out your HTTP errors, have a quick look at HTTP Status Dogs, which I blogged about a while back.

Serverlessconf 2016 – New York City: a personal report

Serverlessconf 2016 – New York City: a personal report – is a fascinating read.  Let me get you hooked:

This event left me with the impression (or the confirmation) that there are two paces and speeds at which people are moving.

There is the so called “legacy” pace. This is often characterized by the notion of VMs and virtualization. This market is typically on-prem, owned by VMware and where the majority of workloads (as of today) are running. Very steady.

The second “industry block” is the “new stuff” and this is a truly moving target. #Serverless is yet another model that we are seeing emerging in the last few years. We have moved from Cloud (i.e. IaaS) to opinionated PaaS, to un-opinionated PaaS, to DIY Containers, to CaaS (Containers as a Service) to now #Serverless. There is no way this is going to be the end of it as it’s a frenetic moving target and in every iteration more and more people will be left behind.

This time around was all about the DevOps people being “industry dinosaurs”. So if you are a DevOps persona, know you are legacy already.

Sometimes I feel like I am leaving on a different planet.  All these people are so close, yet so far away …