Neil Hopcroft

My hosting provider started complaining that I was faulting. Which seemed a bit weird because I was fundamentally the only person using my server, and it isn’t like I was pushing very hard. I figured this was more about upselling me to a service I don’t really need than actual problems.

So I started down a path of migrating this blog to AWS. I’ve been playing with cloud services at work for the last few years, polishing up the Terraform skills wasn’t going to be difficult. Indeed, I forked Janus to leverage some of the self-hosting joy of the Spacelift. In times passed I spent months scripting the automatic launching of a bootstrap Jenkins machine to reliably and repeatably run Terraform deployments. No more. Spacelift takes your Terraform and manages the deployments and statefiles for you, and it can manage its own resources, to allow you to deploy changes to your own stacks. Janus then takes that ability and gives you deployments of itself too.

Of course, while I have been through the bootstrap process for Janus before, my memory is full of holes and my second attempt, with my own infrastructure, failed to import its own stack. And now I cannot remember how to do it (Jaremy is a genius, but documentation is not his strong point). But I can still use the stack deployment and dependency abilities, to get myself deploying automatically. GitOops ftw. GitOps. Whatever.

Because my memory is full of holes my ECS deployment could either have a load balancer or download its container, but not both, so I went with the upsell for a year, while I tinker with Terraform to build from first principals what my memory won’t let me have. Migration is the only constant.

Now that I have some horsepower behind my service again I accidentally imported my livejournal into the beginning of this blog. Which seems to have gone fairly well and all my LJ friends are still there and their comments are still there and I now have a two decade history of blogging only a few clicks away. It isn’t the same without everyone elses journals, of course, but at least I’ve brought mine into a state where I don’t have to worry about the Russians.

And now I start tagging those posts, because the tags were lost in the move and who knows how much sense those tags would have made now anyway. There are a surprising number of ‘culture shock’ moments early in those posts – the LJ started by documenting my move to Tokyo. My grammar was terrible in those days, even worse than now, spelling likewise. Never mind, I’m going to leave it in its raw goodness for you to enjoy at your leisure, and will highlight anything I find worthy of sharing.