June 2020 – Lord of Geeks

The past week has been spent trying to build a centralized Gitlab CICD repository for all services to bootstrap and standardize on.

I’m happy to announce that it has been open sourced! https://gitlab.com/mycf.sg/central-cicd

What’s a centralized CI? It’s basically a template repository for CI pipelines. In this case, it’s for Gitlab because I’m familiar with it and it’s what I’m working with day in day out.

This idea started with my previous project team, but is slowly maturing as I figure out the various cases that it might be used/useful and tweak it accordingly. What it has currently is more of a MVP and POC that it can be used across various projects on Gitlab. You know that because the versioning currently only support patch and not minor/major bumps. It has something to do with how my current team does versioning but it’s the top of my list for things to improve.

Currently there are 4 repositories relying on the CCI, 2 of which are external but still within my control. Features will be incrementally added onto it, and I hope that this could really be something that would help people reduce the amount of time/complexity to build pipelines.

As I am helping another team part time to setup some infra on AWS, I felt my fundamental AWS knowledge being tested all over again. I’ve gotten so used to doing the more “tricky/complex” things that when starting from fresh, got tripped up by some basic setup.

Internet facing ELB must have public subnet associated
As long as the each AZ has a public subnet associated, the ELB will be able to route to the AZ
Public subnets must have IGW, NAT not counted
NAT instance must be created in a subnet which has IGW
ELB does not need to be in the same subnet as Target Group to route to it
ELB needs at least a /27 subnet
ELB reserves 8 IP in the subnet for autoscaling
NLB does not load balance cross-zone by default
ALB load balance cross-zone by default
Smallest subnet in AWS is /28
OpenVPN Access Server needs EIP
OpenVPN Access Server needs to setup through SSH first

While I wasn’t the one who setup the bulk on the networking, I wasn’t able to quickly pinpoint the exact reason why I was unable to get connectivity for the VPN that I was setting up. Just proves that there are some fundamental concepts that I need brushing up on.

On happier news, I finally bought/receive the lube for my future keyboard. Over the weekends I decided to try lubing my current Filco TKL keyboard without disassembly to see how it works/feels.