Ditch That AWS Build Host

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 19:00:00 +0000

In honor of the transnational strike on Amazon this week, here are instructions for moving your AWS unikernels to a cloud that used to claim it wasn’t evil. You might also be interested in establishing a picket line for your packets.

This blog originally ran on Amazon EC2. Since early 2017, it’s been running on a different tech behemoth’s massive public cloud. The deployment process is considerably easier and faster on this alternative public cloud – I first saw it as a live demo given by Michael Bright and immediately knew I wanted to replace my AWS pipeline with it. My AWS unikernel deployments required a secondary Linux host for building AMIs from a kernel image and usually took around 20 minutes from start to finish; GCP deployments can be done from my development host and take around 90 seconds.

I Am Unikernel (And So Can You!)

Sun, 17 Aug 2014 23:47:13 +0000

Julia Evans, prolific blogger and rad person, gave me several kind comments on the “Why I Unikernel” posts (security, self-hosting). She also asked, quite reasonably, whether I’d written a high-level summary of how I host my blog from a unikernel. “No, but I should,” I said, and unlike most times I say I should do something, I actually did it.

Here’s the very-high-level overview:

use brain to generate content that some human, somewhere, might want to read (hardest step)
write all that stuff in Markdown
use Octopress to generate a static site from that Markdown
use Mirage to build a unikernel with the blog content
upload the unikernel to an EC2 instance running Linux
build a new EC2 instance from the uploaded unikernel
make sure that newly generated instance looks like my website with new content
shut down the Linux host that made the new EC2 instance
make somerandomidiot.com point to the new EC2 instance
kill the EC2 instance which previously served somerandomidiot.com

And below, one can find the gory details.

Unikernels on yomimono - something to read

Ditch That AWS Build Host

I Am Unikernel (And So Can You!)