In this series of articles we will describe our migration experience to AWS. Why a migration? Our old provider had limits. We had to overcome. In particular: No automation No flexibility No autoscaling If we wanted to grow it was necessary to migrate to a provider with these features. Need…
In this article we are going to describe how we realized our RDS infrastructure using Ansible as automation tool. We’ve completely avoided using AWS GUI, both for implementation and management activities. Our aim was to develop a parametric infrastructure, able to adapt to all of our projects simply by changing few parameters in…
This article starts a series of posts regarding a case-study about Symfony and multi-tenancy. Subject of the case-study is our flagship software Nuvola, a multi-tenancy product for schools, used since 2013 by more than 1 thousands Italian schools. Nuvola let them fulfill their administrative tasks, teachers completely accomplish their work online (grade…
Saturday the 15th of October we leaved the comfort of our couches (have we already said we are a distributed team from all around Italy?) to leave to the glorious destination of Rome! The ancient town best known for the engineers of the Roman empire, was once again at center…
Getting informations on a running instance from the inside is a tedious task and it’s usually done in an insecure and error prone way. With this article we want to show you our way to get instance tags from the inside of a running instance. Setting up your Ec2 instance…
It’s said necessity is the mother of invention and in this article we’ll show the reason why we initially wrote s3-pit-restore. Our infrastructure heavily rely on S3 object storage to store the several millions files our users everyday produce. S3 works reliably and everything went well until we were in…
Sometimes happens, as it happened to us, that you have one or more services you want to share between your VPCs. For us, the case was for an ELK stack that we use internally to monitor the state of our infrastructure. With this article we want to share our recipe…
AWS is well known for its cloud services for almost everything you need in a cloud environment. As Madisoft we like them a lot and we use many of them for our cloud activities. We’re very proud and happy to be part of the AWS Meetup in Rome on 15th…
We were looking for a way to have our EC2 EBS volumes snapshotted on a daily basis. We already use AWS and Ansible, so the solution comes quite straightforward: Ansible + AWS = Daily Snapshots Our procedure works with Ansible >= 2.1. First step is about gathering every information required to build the…
Sessions are one of the main building blocks of a login-based web application. We’re going to see what they are, what Symfony offers us to handle them and how to scale when you have ton of them. What’s a session? As you know the HTTP protocol is stateless: each request is independent from…