Create a new server image for a RightScale server template
The RightScale server templates publish server images to launch. It is advisable to create your own server image because the cloud providers can remove their published images anytime. If you generate your own image, you control the lifecycle of those.…
Prevent the auto-termination of stranded instances in RighScale
When you launch an instance with RightScale Self Service, and the Chef cookbook execution fails, the instance goes into “stranded” mode. By default RightScale Self Service terminates the stranded instances, so there is no way to remote into…
Upgrade a server on an AWS EC2 instance with minimum risk and downtime
When you need to upgrade an application on an AWS EC2 instance with minimum downtime, there are many options. Upgrade an EC2 instance Stop the application, so users don’t make more changes, Create a backup of the database (snapshot of the RDS…
Test your RightScale script without creating unnecessary revisions
There are certain functions in RightScale scripts (RightScripts) that you cannot test without launching a new instance. To test your script: Edit the Head revision of the RightScale script and save it, Attach the Head revision of the RightScale script to…
Find the AWS AMI that a RightScale server template is using
When you use RightScale to launch servers in the cloud, you want to use the same base image to test your Chef cookbooks in Test Kitchen. Packer by Hashicorp is a utility to create custom server images based on cloud images. You supply the image ID and…
DevOps Engineering part 7. – Launching production instances in the cloud
In the previous parts of this tutorial we have launched instances (servers) in the cloud, but those were created by Test Kitchen, running on our workstation. Those instances are as good as they can be, but the cookbook did not reside on the Chef server.…