devops

A few months ago, I was approached by a firm asking to become a consultant. I starting thinking about how I would run the whole practice. I decided to share this with the world.

I recently moved all my compute resources over to Spot Instances in AWS. I love it. If you’re not using Spot in your applications, I hope this will convince you to look into it.

At Arkiom, I led the migration from managed hosting in a datacenter in Utah to AWS. We were having problems with our hosting provider’s lackluster support and performing destructive maintenance without communication. I was working as a developer, but I had previous server admin experience, so I proposed we move. For the next 6 months, I performed cost analysis, provided migration plans, and configured the 15 servers we’d need for all our projects. One product at a time, I turned on the new servers, migrated the DNS, and shut down the old ones. The only hiccups we had were with our Federal clients who whitelisted our IPs. Small wrinkles ironed out, we were fully “in the cloud”.

Yesterday, while sharing a beer with my coworkers, we discussed an idea I’ve been kicking around for many years now. We joked and laughed while wondering aloud if anyone would be interested. Then, the name was coined: “DevOps Hell’s Kitchen”.

The premise is fairly simple. Two teams of software engineers compete in head-to-head challenges week after week. These challenges could be oriented around known computing problems or designed to educate. Things like “process a million messages from a queue” or “send billions of emails”. Every challenge is cost-bound, meaning the team that successfully completes the challenge in the time allotted, for the lowest cost, will be the winner. The losing team votes a person off the team.

I want to build static sites to capitalize on really cheap hosting via S3. I have probably a dozen sites I’ll host on here, so all solutions will be 10x more expensive. I also want to know if building a CI/CD platform on Lambda is feasible. With systems like Jenkins, it’s really hard to hit 100% utilization. Lambda gives us that possibility, provided this all works.