Meta

Ditch That AWS Build Host

In honor of the transnational strike on Amazon this week, here are instructions for moving your AWS unikernels to a cloud that used to claim it wasn’t evil. You might also be interested in establishing a picket line for your packets.

This blog originally ran on Amazon EC2. Since early 2017, it’s been running on a different tech behemoth’s massive public cloud. The deployment process is considerably easier and faster on this alternative public cloud – I first saw it as a live demo given by Michael Bright and immediately knew I wanted to replace my AWS pipeline with it. My AWS unikernel deployments required a secondary Linux host for building AMIs from a kernel image and usually took around 20 minutes from start to finish; GCP deployments can be done from my development host and take around 90 seconds.

Some Random Idiot

My first interesting job was as a student systems administrator for a fairly heterogenous group of UNIX servers. For the first many months, I was essentially a clever interface to an array of search engines. I came to have a great appreciation for the common phenomenon of a detailed solution to a very specific problem, laid out beautifully in the personal site of someone I’d never met. I answered a lot of “how on Earth did you figure that out?” with “somebody on the Internet wrote about it”.