A multi part study over Digital Ocean Droplets to AWS EKS Kubernetes

I began working with a client recently who's ask was to help sure up their infrastructure for their web application. So I'll give a brief background to their current infrastructure, woes, and happy moments. Then follow that up with the plan set forth and currently underway.

I'll make this a multi-part blog post as summarizing everything done in one post will just result in an extremely lengthy novel that no one will want to read.

Their infrastructure was mostly housed in Digital Ocean using multiple droplets. They had dev, qa, and production environments all running in separate droplets.

Alongside some corresponding postgres databases, also housed under Digital Ocean. 

Let's take a moment to focus in on the dev environment, while also housing their dev instance, it also housed a few self hosted services.

and nginx configuration for routing to each of these applications

The ultimate ask was "we want zero down time deploys and a better, more reliable, and transparent infrastructure."

So let's bring up the hot word item you may have heard before.

Migrate lower environments to AWS Kubernetes (using EKS) backed by Helm to make templating easy

Test and verify, cut over each environment on the DNS as they were good to go

Migrate over to Gtihub and shut down Gitea

Migrate over to Github Actions and shut down Drone

Shut down postgres Digital Ocean and turn Digital Ocean off for good

Set up Terraform to back all the resources in code

I am happy to report that I am just about wrapped up with this project and will be moving on to the next series of work soon.

In the following post I will outline the steps necessary for the applications in Digital Ocean droplets to get migrated over into Kubernetes in AWS.

Migrating to AWS

When thinking about the new design for Robo House and the direction I wanted to take. Blogging and general content authorship was on my list of things to have... But I didn't want the bloat of a headless Wordpress site, the templating troubles of Ghost, or the clunk of Contentful. I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time working to get plugins in order or building out my API to source posts. And I sure as hell didn't want to have to spend the money hosting any of these.

I wanted something lightweight and extremely fast to get started with. Something without a ton of bells and whistles that could distract me from writing. I knew I wanted to build it in Nextjs and so I began my search.

Thats where I found Sanity.io - and it checked all the boxes. Setup was almost instantaneous. Authorship was simple and quick to get working in. And being able to source the content for static site generation in Next was out of the box from their client. They bring a unique touch to running a CMS where the authorship lies on your local machine. So part of my development workflow involved standing up a studio platform to write my content on a local websever.

From there the content is uploaded to their systems, and then sourced back to my Nextjs application. Allowing me to build my site and author all in one repo.

Another perk that I enjoy with using Sanity is that since it's all built and running locally, it gives me access to the code here. Which means I can add plugins or even change or add features as I see fit. Already out of the box Sanity gives the option for you to customize the schema, and from that, it build's the UI around it. If I want a post to have a tagline, I can simply add that  as part of my post schema:

And thats it. Now Sanity's studio will automatically give me a new input field for adding a tagline. Which can be read from Nextjs when I source my posts. 

Another thought that came to mind was code highlighting. This was something I needed to be able to add on the authorship side as well as in the frontend of React. In came a Sanity plugin 

 which allowed me to create on the spot code injection to my authoring experience. 

Sanity comes out of the box with some pre-defined schemas. One of them being 

 which essentially sets up the various text formatting a few other additional options like inline images. Similarly like adding a tagline, in here I am able to add a code block like so

And on the frontend side of things. I'm using another tool provided by Sanity, 

 which allows me to easily define how to wrap various blocks of text and other content coming from Sanity.

And from here I can define what a code block looks like, using 

 type this gave me all the syntax highlighting I needed to get my point across to you folk.

As I build the new Robo House website I plan to make a lot of customizations to my studio's platform. Allowing more and more content to come through in a unique state. The idea of being able to share more infrastructure work will be interesting to see unfold.