Deployments are a key part of running a web application, but most of the time, they are an afterthought when it comes to process and developer ease-of-use. However, using a number of AWS services, deployments can be made much easier, with most of the process automated. On the Accord ODR project, we use ECS to […]
Scheduled jobs (or Cron jobs) are a standard part of web development. Whether you want to update comment counts every night or check for updates once a week, a scheduled job allows you to “set and forget”. There are a number of methods to implement scheduled jobs. Some rudimentary web apps check the schedule each […]
Security Groups are a best practice feature of VPCs in AWS that act similar to a firewall. They allow access to various resources such as EC2 instances, load balancers or RDS databases to be controlled to other resources or a set of IP addresses. For example, you may set up an EC2 instance to only […]
I recently started working on a ticket where I was asked to add a new mail template and the logic behind it. I have not really worked with either Mandrill or Mailchimp much before, so I started doing research into how to do this. Every blog post and Stack Overflow post that I could find […]
One of the best ways of working out who is how many people are visiting your site, see patterns of traffic and analyse them over time is to look at your access logs. Most web servers collect some form of access logs, mostly in a standard format such as the Common Log Format. As a CDN, […]
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AWS Security GameDay
Remember remember, the 5th November…the Resolver developers took part in another AWS GameDay! Our team of 4 had a wide range of engineering, AWS, and most importantly, GameDay experience. Given that the Resolver team were prize-winners at the last GameDay in July, the pressure was on to keep up our reputation. Like the last time, […]
If you have an app that accepts file uploads, then either you’re aware of the potential risks, or you should be. With Accord ODR, we started by limiting the types of files that can be uploaded by users. This is the easy part: disallow executable files or anything else that can be scripted. This includes […]
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Using VCR in tests
VCR is a gem that is super helpful if your Ruby application is using an external API. When testing, if an actual API is called, this will result in slow test performance. Although a single test may not seem that slow when run individually, the impact of using many API calls in tests will significantly […]
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CI using GitHub and AWS CodeBuild
Last time, we mentioned CI as one of things that we try to automate as much as possible. This time, we’ll go through more details about our CI setup and how it relates to our deployment pipeline. Setting up the CodeBuild project As well as being used as part of a CodePipeline, CodeBuild can also […]
At Resolver, we aim to automate as much of the boring technical jobs as possible, and that includes the whole continuous integration (CI) and deployment pipeline. We trigger these from GitHub, so a mere push or merge can kick-off our automated test suite or deploy to our staging environment for more automated and manual testing. […]