luhman.org

This is a follow-up to a previous post where I was having trouble running apt-get as part of the initial boot process for a new AWS instance.

I actually never could automatically load packages using the recommended workaround of using apt_mirror :


#cloud-config
apt_mirror: http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/


When I'd check the cloud-init log at /var/log/ apt-get would just sort of silently fail.

Ubuntu's cloud-init is a mechanism which can be used to provision a new instance upon initial boot. I imagine cloud-init can be used in many environments, but I'll focus on its use in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

You can invoke cloud-init in at least a couple ways :

- shell, with a lead line of #!/bin/sh
- cloud-init, with a lead line of #cloud-config

I was able to install the AWS PHP SDK 2 on Ubuntu 12.04 using Composer.

Here's a simple script which will show sample output from the EC2 Describe commands :

https://gist.github.com/dkl4/5135777

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the new SDK for PHP 2 for Amazon Web Services (AWS) is kind of lacking in documentation. Since the PHP SDK 2 for AWS is pretty new (November, 2012), hopefully this lack of documentation will be addressed. However, here are some notes which will help me and hopefully others.

At least for now, I'll focus on EC2 examples and code as that's what I need at the moment.

I'm pretty new to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and especially "managing" AWS through PHP, so hopefully this will help me and others.

There are apparently two ("1" and "2") PHP-based SDKs available to manage AWS with PHP. It looks like version two was announced in November, 2012.

When the PHP SDK 2 was released, it seemed like it didn't support as many AWS features as PHP SDK 1, but now SDK 2 seems to support all AWS features, including new ones like OpsWorks.

So which one is better?

Attached is a presentation I gave at my local Tri-Valley Drupal Users Group.

It outlines how to perform a minor "point" upgrade of Drupal. For example, updating Drupal (an modules) from 6.12 to 6.26 or 7.14 to 7.15.

Updating Drupal Presentation

SimpleTest is a nice testing framework for testing PHP-based applications at the unit and functional level. However, I (and others) have had trouble getting JUnit-compatible XML output for use in continuous integration servers like Jenkins.

SimpleTest provides a built-in XML-based output, but it seems to be mostly for internal communication by SimpleTest itself. It's not JUnit compatible.

To convert SimpleTest output into JUnit-compatible XML, I've seen at least a few posts :

Over the year's I've kind of gone back and forth on SimpleTest, a PHP-based unit test framework.

A few years ago, when PHPUnit was in its infancy, SimpleTest was the best PHP-based unit test framework. In the past few years, however, it seems like PHPUnit has been improved continually, while SimpleTest has languished somewhat.

Currently, I believe PHPUnit is the best choice for true "unit" ("micro") testing, while SimpleTest seems to be better for modest functional (integration) testing.

VirtualBox has been my main desktop virtualization solution for the past 3-4 years. VirtualBox started out as a kind of weaker version of VMware Workstation, but VirtualBox has really improved (branched snapshots etc.) over the past few years so I really can't complain especially since it has a liberal evaluation license.

VirtualBox is pretty friendly for desktop users, and is a so-called Type 2 hypervisor, so I wondered how it would fare in terms of performance relative to Hyper-V or ESXi. Turns out not too bad.

My performance tests indicated no clear winner in CPU-intensive tasks. Hyper-V sort of won the I/O tests, but I think you could probably get any desired outcome based on how you tweak the tests, so I'd even call that a wash.

So choosing the right virtualization solution for me comes down to usability and cost.

For me, Hyper-V seemed to have an edge in usability. I have no desire to earn a PhD in virtualization, and Hyper-V seems to have wizards and online docs which made things easier for me.