When we talk about storage we often think about hard drives, USB sticks and devices of the kind. All those solutions are okay for personal computers (and even for servers to store the basic Operating System data) but, when it comes to scaling, we need something better. The main problem of using volumes in HDD […]
Using Alibaba Cloud DevOps Flow to automate an ECS Deployment
Called just “Flow“, this is the long-awaited DevOps tool from Alibaba Cloud. Until now, this cloud provider didn’t have any CI/CD platform to help developers automate pipelines. Automating pipelines is a must nowadays for any software company, as makes deployments easier and more consistent, this reduces significantly human errors as completely removes manual steps of […]
Migrate a WordPress site from Alibaba Cloud SAS to ECS
Terms like “Cloud Computing“, “Cloud Server“, “Virtual Machine” or “Database” could be daunting for someone who is just starting. This is why I completely understand the people who are having a hard time deciding whether or not create a blog or e-commerce site. Even if you’re not an IT expert and have never created a cloud […]
Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch Tutorial & Optimisation
Alibaba Cloud’s Elasticsearch Service has come a long way from when it was first introduced, and I believe it is ready for most production workloads. It wipes out most of the pain of operating Elasticsearch all by yourself, and letting you to focus on your application or business. Note that, if you’ve never set up […]
Using Serverless Devs to run a “Hello World” with Alibaba Cloud
As you know, I’ve been talking and developing production-ready solutions in a Serverless fashion since 2018, which sounds “forever” in this IT world. In the beginning, I used the amazing tool called fun developed by Alibaba to deploy them, and this made my life easier since then. Apparently, Alibaba deprecated fun in favour of another tool called […]
Host-based routing with Alibaba Cloud Kubernetes (ACK)
When creating a multi-deployment platform in Kubernetes, you will quickly realise how many LoadBalancer-type Services you deployed. This is usually not a problem with a self-built, self-hosted Cluster, as you manage how things gets created. The problem appears when you use managed Kubernetes solutions like Alibaba Cloud ACK, as it will create an SLB (Server […]
Testing the Alibaba Cloud Elastic Desktop Service (EDS)
Thanks to being an MVP Diamond I became one of the first to test this VDI product called EDS back in February. I was such an early adopter that at the beginning I couldn’t even write a post about this, as I first needed to help Alibaba Cloud’s EDS Product Developer to test several points of […]
Testing the new Alibaba Cloud 7th Gen ECS Instances
As part of being an Alibaba Cloud MVP, I get to test from time to time new products from this cloud provider for free, which is a really nice thing to have. This greatly helps me with my business, Guztia Consulting, as we specialise in Accelerating Sites in China. In this occasion, thanks to some […]
Best Practices Dealing With Large Docker Images in Alibaba Cloud Kubernetes
All applications starts in the same way, usually with a simple deployment made up of a tiny and organised Docker Container which is built and deployed within minutes. As your business grows, that tiny Docker Container doesn’t rely on a small Image anymore, and the assets built in it, the compiled code and all those […]
Lower the latency of your application in China with EIP & BGP Pro
The usual problem for companies with some sort of presence in China is the platform speed for their end users located in the Mainland, this stems from the complexities deriving out the views on how the Internet should work according the Chinese authorities. Why is this? For a big part, China’s view of the internet is […]
About How A Single Character Broke Alibaba Cloud’s Container Registry
You load the site… it doesn’t work. You check the console… some weird error. You examine the code… nothing specially wrong. The debugging nightmare begins! This post starts with something “too” common in programming, am I right? Yes, I am :D There is just too many cases where production breaks “just because” and turns out is […]
Adding visibility to inter-VPC connections with Alibaba Cloud Firewall Enterprise
In the last article I talked about the product called Cloud Firewall, the FaaS (Firewall as a Service) from Alibaba Cloud, a great alternative and a must-go in terms of capabilities, pricing and low maintenance. And that is precisely why I’m not going to talk now about that, smart! This article will focus on one […]
Overview of the Cloud Firewall from Alibaba Cloud
When it comes to protecting machines from malicious network connections there are plenty of options, and depends on which portion of the network request you care about. If our concern is at a network level, like around the layer 3 or 4 of the OSI model, a firewall is the most likely tool that will […]
Terminating SSL and setting up an Alibaba Cloud SLB with Kubernetes
SSL termination, sometimes so easy, sometimes so hard… If you ended up reading this article you probably are in the second group. Welcome to the brotherhood, mate. Our problem China! No, not China as a whole. We are talking about getting SSL certificates inside China Mainland, as the Chinese Cybersecurity Law is quite strict […]
Getting up and running a basic managed Alibaba Cloud ElasticSearch
There are moments in the development of a platform where you know you hit a point of no return. Remember Emmet Brown in Back To The Future III? Yep, pass that point and you either succeed or fall into the ravine and die, nothing in between. What are we talking about here? SEARCH, in […]