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)

Comments

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...

"You are a friendly breadwinner"

A recent blog post by Pete Koomen about how we still lack truly "AI-native" software got me thinking about the kinds of applications I’d like to see. As the blog post says, AI should handle the boring stuff and leave the interesting parts for me. I listed down a few tasks I've dealt with recently and wrote some system prompts for potential agentic AIs: Check that the GDPR subprocessor list is up to date. Also, ensure we have a signed data processing agreement in place with the necessary vendors. Write a summary of what you did and highlight any oddities or potentially outdated vendors. Review our product’s public-facing API. Ensure the domain objects are named consistently. Here's a link to our documentation describing the domain. Conduct a SOC 2 audit of our system and write a report with your findings. Send the report to Slack. Once you get approval, start implementing the necessary changes. These could include HR-related updates, changes to cloud infras...

RocksDB data recovery

I recently needed to do some maintenance on a RocksDB key-value store. The task was simple enough, just delete some keys as the db served as a cache and did not contain any permanent data. I used the RocksDB cli administration tool ldb to erase the keys. After running a key scan with it, I got this error Failed: Corruption: Snappy not supported or corrupted Snappy compressed block contents So a damaged database. Fortunately, there's a tool to fix it, and after running it, I had access to the db via the admin tool. All the data was lost though. Adding and removing keys worked fine but all the old keys were gone. It turned out that the corrupted data was all the data there was. The recovery tool made a backup folder, and I recovered the data by taking the files from the backup folder and manually changing the CURRENT file to point to the old MANIFEST file which is apparently how RocksDB knows which sst (table) files to use. I could not access the data with the admin tool, ...

Koodihommia

Search This Blog