Posts

Real Backups Get Tested This is yet another peek into my Terraform+Ansible Infrastructure as Code setup. I mentioned onsite+offsite backups of my (proudly minimally scoped) production server deployments – this article is all about how I restore from offsite backups in case of a genuine disaster that knocks out any onsite block storage. Peace of mind, for me, is knowing my critical data is safe. I’ve made quite a few mistakes over the years hosting and managing my own services – the toughest ones were all data loss.

Minimal Interop from Terraform to Ansible I have plans to publish more code and maybe eventually write larger posts about this once grinding out and reading a lot of code isn’t my full time priority. Currently I’m focusing most of my efforts on an upcoming project. I’ve taken brushing up on Infrastructure as Code on as a side project in anticipation of needing a “set and forget” backend deployment solution. MVP for this capability is: compute, storage, firewall, VPN admin access, onsite+offsite backups and monitoring.

Hugo on DigitalOcean App Platform I decided to publish the Terraform module for this site just to get a feel for using non-local modules. It wraps the digitalocean_app resource with a hardcoded spec for a static site. Hardcoding is usually a bit of a stink but in its current form the resource isn’t anything you need a “shortcut” for – it’s literally identical to the examples in the provider documentation. I experimented with outputting the domain name from my DNS module so that it could be inputted as a variable to use for spec.

Recently, I started a project using DigitalOcean and discovered the App Platform’s static site feature. I think I had heard about it before I discovered it in their documentation but it’s exactly what I needed – GitHub pages (for my traffic needs which fit into the free tier) with any public Git provider. I can deploy a static site automatically with a simple platform-agnostic CI/CD step (one curl command that runs on push).