Skip to main content

DigitalOcean droplet provisioning with Pulumi

The snowflake VM I run my experiments on has a serious flaw. I can't remember what I have installed there. It is embarrassing as some essential services to me run there.

As an enterprisey developer, my attention draws naturally towards IaC solutions for this particular memory issue. The code of the experimentations is in git, so why not the infra. Some would say it is a major overkill since we are talking literally about one domain running on the puniest DigitalOcean droplet. I say I have a weekend to spare on silly stuff.


The easiest choice is to write some Terraform. Yet come to think of it, is it still an obvious pick in 2022? I've never written anything too complex with it but having heard so much backlash against Terraform language, is it time for something new? The answer turns out to be a yes.


The IaC solution for me in 2022 is Pulumi. It has a catchy name, a base for a good dad joke for a Finn. Besides that, Pulumi has some attractive qualities to it.


  • It is declarative
  • I can write the code in TS or Go
  • I can store the state for free in their service


The actual Pulumi code is super simple in my case. I struggled somewhat with how to pass configs stored in Pulumi around. Here is a snippet of how to do that for a user data script (yes, this is old-school stuff)


import * as pulumi from '@pulumi/pulumi'
import {Droplet, DropletSlug, Region} from '@pulumi/digitalocean';
import * as fs from 'fs';
const dropletName = 'myDroplet';
const region = Region.AMS2;
const size = DropletSlug.DropletS1VCPU1GB;
const config = new pulumi.Config();
const someConfig = config.require('someconfig');
const someOtherConfig = config.require('someotherconfig');
const baseUserData = fs.readFileSync('./user-data.sh', 'utf8')
const userData = pulumi.all([someConfig, someOtherConfig]).apply(([some, other]) => {
return `
#!/bin/bash
export SOMETHING_I_NEED_IN_SCRIPT=${some}
export SOMETHING_ELSE_I_NEED_IN_SCRIPT=${other}
${baseUserData}
`;
});
const droplet = new Droplet(dropletName, {
image: 'ubuntu-20-04-x64',
region,
size,
monitoring: true,
userData,
});
view raw index.ts hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm not a passionate developer

A family friend of mine is an airlane pilot. A dream job for most, right? As a child, I certainly thought so. Now that I can have grown-up talks with him, I have discovered a more accurate description of his profession. He says that the truth about the job is that it is boring. To me, that is not that surprising. Airplanes are cool and all, but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic sitting next to the colleague you have been talking to past five years, how stimulating can that be? When he says the job is boring, it is not a bad kind of boring. It is a very specific boring. The "boring" you would want as a passenger. Uneventful.  Yet, he loves his job. According to him, an experienced pilot is most pleased when each and every tiny thing in the flight plan - goes according to plan. Passengers in the cabin of an expert pilot sit in the comfort of not even noticing who is flying. As someone employed in a field where being boring is not exactly in high demand, this sounds pro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Canyon Precede:ON 7

I bought or technically leased a Canyon Precede:ON 7 (2022) electric bike last fall. This post is about my experiences with it after riding for about 2000 km this winter. The season was a bit colder than usual, and we had more snow than in years, so I properly put the bike through its paces. I've been cycling for almost 20 years. I've never owned a car nor used public transport regularly. I pedal all distances below 30km in all seasons. Besides commuting, I've mountain biked and raced BMX, and I still actively ride my road bike during the spring and summer months. I've owned a handful of bikes and kept them until their frames failed. Buying new bikes or gear has not been a major part of my hobby, and frankly, I'm quite sceptical about the benefits of updating bikes or gear frequently. I've never owned an E-bike before, but I've rented one a couple of times. The bike arrived in a hilariously large box. I suppose there's no need to worry about damage durin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Emit structured Postgres data change events with wal2json

A common thing I see in an enterprise system is that when an end-user does some action, say add a user, the underlying web of subsystems adds the user to multiple databases in separate transactions. Each of these transactions may happen in varying order and, even worse, can fail, leaving the system in an inconsistent state. A better way could be to write the user data to some main database and then other subsystems like search indexes, pull/push the data to other interested parties, thus eliminating the need for multiple end-user originating boundary transactions. That's the theory part; how about a technical solution. The idea of this post came from the koodia pinnan alla podcast about event-driven systems and CDC . One of the discussion topics in the show is emitting events from Postgres transaction logs.  I built an utterly simple change emitter and reader using Postgres with the wal2json transaction decoding plugin and a custom go event parser. I'll stick to the boring ...
Post a Comment
Read more