Cogini Blog Articles in the DevOps category
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Deploying an Elixir app to Digital Ocean with mix_deploy Port forwarding with iptables
Running a local caching DNS for your app
When your app is acting as a proxy to back end servers, DNS can become a bottleneck. Running a local caching DNS server on the app server machine speeds up performance. Read more…
Creating an ssh key
How to create an ssh key for beginners Read more…
Running Nerves on Amazon EC2
I have been looking into the best way to deploy Elixir in the cloud. As part of that, I have been building various AMIs with only the minimum needed to run an Elixir app. Nerves is a framework for building embedded systems in Elixir. Instead of running a general purpose … Read more…
Servers for beginners
Spinning up a server is easy enough, just go to Digital Ocean and push a button. But now you are responsible for your server. What does that mean? Read more…
Managing app secrets with Ansible
In web applications we usually have a few things that are sensitive, e.g. the login to the production database or API keys used to access a third party API. We need to be particularly careful about how we manage these secrets, as they may allow attackers to access data … Read more…
Improving app security with the principle of least privilege
The security principle of "least privilege" means that apps should only have the permissions that they need to do their job, nothing more. If an attacker compromises your app, then they can't do anything outside of what the app would normally do. They may be able to break the application … Read more…
Deploying your Phoenix app to Digital Ocean for beginners
This is a gentle introduction to getting your Phoenix app up and running on a $5/month server at Digital Ocean. It starts from zero, assuming minimal experience with servers. Read more…
Choosing a Linux distribution
I have been using Linux since 1993, so I will give a bit of a history lesson to explain the motivation behind the popular distributions. There are two main families, RedHat and Debian. RedHat traditionally comes from the corporate world, and Debian from the free software community. Read more…
Benchmarking Phoenix on Digital Ocean
Just for fun, I decided to benchmark the performance of the elixir deploy template running on a $5/month Digital Ocean Droplet. Read more…
Database migrations in the cloud
Database migrations are used to automatically keep the database in sync with the code that uses it. Elixir apps should be deployed as releases, supervised by systemd. Here is an example of how to run migrations when deploying Elixir releases. It's tempting to automatically run database migrations when the app … Read more…