One of the things that Pulumi makes it really easy to do is to set up AWS EC2 instances. What sometimes comes up in issues or support requests is a question about why that instance keeps being refreshed and it’s often down to the way AWS names the EBS devices.

I’m going to talk about a couple of things here: 1) How to configure your root EBS volume in your EC2 instance and 2) How to add an extra volume whilst making sure that it’s correctly named (all using Pulumi of course).

I’ve been investigating running ingress controllers on Kubernetes recently, especially ones on a private IP address so that I can set up a public load balancer in front and control access that way. Testing that the controller from the internet without any access into the network proved to be an interesting challenge.

I’ve seen many people talk about writing posts to help them learn, but it’s not something I’ve ever really done. Usually because I’m worried about the fact that someone has already written about it, or that no one will find it interesting.

One thing I wanted to do when I restarted this blog was to set up Codespaces so that I could write posts from my iPad as well as from my laptop. It was pretty easy to do. Admittedly my container is pretty simple, just installing hugo and git (I’ve got my theme in a submodule so I need git to checkout that) and my devcontainer.json is pretty empty as well. Annoyingly it’s not easy to type on here with the on-screen keyboard, plus I can’t type a backtick so I can’t do code syntax either.

This is a getting started post.