About Corey QuinnOver the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.Links
CHAOSSEARCH
Console Recorder on Chrome Web Store
Console Recorder on Firefox Add-Ons
Screaming in the Cloud
Ian Mckay’s GitHub for AWSConsoleRecorder
Twitter: @QuinnyPig
TranscriptCorey Quinn: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show exposes the semi-polite lie that is whiteboard architecture diagrams. You see, a child can draw a whiteboard architecture, but the real world is a mess. We discuss the hilariously bad decisions that make it into shipping products, the unfortunate hacks the real-world forces us to build, and that the best to call your staging environment is “theory” because invariably, whatever you’ve built works in the theory, but not in production. Let’s get to it.On this show, I talk an awful lot about architectural patterns that are horrifying. Let’s instead talk for a moment about something that isn’t horrifying. CHAOSSEARCH. Architecturally, they do things right. They provide a log analytics solution that separates out your storage from your compute. The data lives inside of your S3 buckets, and you can access it using APIs you’ve come to know and tolerate, through a series of containers that live next to that S3 storage. Rather than replicating massive clusters that you have to care and feed for yourself, instead, you now get to focus on just storing data, treating it like you normally would other S3 data and not replicating it, storing it on expensive disks in triplicate, and fundamentally not having to deal with the pains of running other log analytics infrastructure. Check them out today at CHAOSSEARCH.io.You’ll notice that I periodically refer to various friends of the show as code terrorists. It’s never been explained, until now, exactly what that means and why I use that term. So, today, I thought I’d go ahead and help shine a little bit of light on that. One of the folks that I refer to most frequently is Ian Mckay, a fine gentleman based out of Australia. And he’s built something that is both amazing and terrible all at the same time, called Console Recorder. But let me back up before I dive into this monstrosity. Let’s talk about how we get things that we build in AWS into production. There are basically four tiers. Tier one is using the AWS web console itself, we click around and we build things. Great. Tier two is we use CloudFormation like sensible folks. Tier three is Terraform with all of its various attendant tooling, and then there’s the ultra tier four that I do, which is we use the AWS console and then we lie about it. Some folks are gonna play around here and say that oh, you should use the CDK, or something like that, or custom scripts that wind up spinning up production. And all of those are well and good, but only recently did CloudFormation release the ability to import existing resources. And even then, much like Terraform import, it’s pretty gnarly and not at all terrific. So, what do you wind up generally doing? Well, if you’re like me, you’ll stand up production resources inside of an AWS account. You will click around in the console—I always start with the console, not because I don’t know how these other tools work, that’s a side point, but rather because that helps me get a sense for how these services are imagined by the teams building them. They tend to assume that everyone who interacts with them is going to go through the console at some point, or at least they should. So, it gives me access and exposure to what their vision of this service is. Then once you’ve built someth