Trying to avoid lock-in
While building my services I am trying to avoid lock-in as much as possible. I especially try avoiding to tie myself to a non portable technology. For example I could have used Heroku. I used it in the past, it’s very cool. But it doesn’t allow to upload files. I mean it does, but storage is not permanent. The suggested way is to upload files to S3. Another dependency. You see where this is going?
Adventures with Servers attacked by Botnets
I have a toy VPS on Digital Ocean. It runs the backend of a very simple prototype for a demo that I had to run almost a year ago. The backend has a signup and login system but fortunately we didn’t use any sensitive data for the demo, just fake email addresses and a bunch of data about businesses like addresses and phone numbers, all publicly available stuff. At the time we were in a rush so I set up the machine without any particular protection.
Monitoring a Server with the Telegram API
Some servers behind Podrover are just workers and do not run a web application, so I can’t use Pingdom and the like to monitor them. I could use some library like Monit but honestly I didn’t want to install one more thing on the server and I like to exploit push notifications when possible. I am already monitoring some behavior of my DB servers via Slack. When some key activity is performed a message is sent to a private Slack group, and I get a notification on my iPhone.