AWS

Online RDS column type modification, using pt-online-schema-change from EC2

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I’m using percona-tools to do an online schema modification today, and thought I would document the process, especially as even the installation guides seem to be badly linked, out of date, and did not work out of the box…

EC2 instance

This is all running on a t3.micro EC2 instance with Ubuntu. I deliberately didn’t go with Amazon Linux, as I wanted to be able to use apt. For simplicities’ sake, I’ll be using the EC2 Instance Connect feature, which allows connection to a session in a web browser! (although the copy and paste via this is annoying)

This instance of course also needs access to your MySQL server, in this case an RDS instance. So I’ll go ahead and add it to the security group.

Percona toolkit

Percona Toolkit is a powerful open-source collection of advanced command-line tools designed to help MySQL and MariaDB DBAs perform tasks like online schema changes, replication troubleshooting, and data auditing safely and efficiently.

It’s used a Wikimedia for online database migrations (the reason I know about it), however I have never actually used it myself!

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Developer previews with AWS, Terraform and GitHub Actions

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As a developer, one of the most critical aspects of your workflow is the ability to test and preview your code changes before deploying them to production. This is where developer previews come in.

This post will outline how to create your own simple developer preview system, using Github Actions for building, AWS S3 for hosting, and Terraform to provision it all. Giving you more control, and a lower cost.

Shout out to Pedro Brandão from Significa whose post I read as inspiration for this setup.

What are Developer Previews?

Developer previews, also known as feature branches or pull request previews, allow developers to create isolated environments to test their changes without impacting the main production environment. It enables teams to collaborate, review, and validate code before merging it into the main branch. With developer previews, you can catch bugs, validate new features, and gather feedback early in the development process, ensuring a smoother deployment to production.

Existing services

Many dedicated platforms exist that offer developer preview as a service. These platforms provide a streamlined solution for creating and managing isolated environments for testing code changes. Examples of such services include Netlify’s Deploy Previews, Vercel’s Preview Deployments, and Heroku Review Apps. These platforms integrate seamlessly with popular version control systems and automatically deploy feature branches or pull requests, allowing developers to easily preview their changes. By leveraging these dev-preview services, developers can simplify the process of creating and managing preview environments, enabling faster iteration and effective collaboration within development teams.

However, all these services have a cost, which will always be higher than the do-it-yourself approach.

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Quick overview of Orain

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Orain is a community-driven, not-for-profit wiki network that I help to maintain.

It runs Mediawiki and has been around for the past couple of years. Over the years it has been hosted on VPSs from multiple different providers and its technical layout has changed massively from each provider. Below I will try to summaries it’s current layout! This will include:

  • The machines / VPSs – ( how many there are, what they are doing and why )
  • The management of these – ( using ansible )
  • The configuration of Mediawiki – ( how Orain is running the ‘wikifarm’ )

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