Scaling applications and ensuring service availability are essential parts of any project, and at some stage of development, they become a necessity. Kubernetes is one of the tools that can address all these needs, but it comes with its costs — support and setup. However, in the end, it’s worth it for large projects. But what about small projects? To avoid using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, we decided to use Docker Swarm. It doesn’t require such hefty investments in support and setup but still allows scaling applications and ensuring high-level service availability. In this article, I’ll explain how to set up a Docker Swarm cluster and configure monitoring using Prometheus and Grafana with Slack notifications.

In our company, we have an internal application that utilizes MongoDB. The application consists of multiple microservices, each interacting with its own MongoDB instance. While the application doesn’t experience heavy loads, it’s critical for our business, so we need it to be resilient. Creating multiple MongoDB instances for each service seemed impractical and costly. Therefore, we opted for a unified resilient MongoDB cluster. Since we currently don’t require sharding, we’ll only be using MongoDB replicas. In this article, I’ll describe how I set up replicas in AWS using Docker and how we use them in our application.

Once again, I come across the situation where our infrastructure becomes a mess, and we migrate everything to Terraform, and in the latest iteration, to AWS CDK. But then the real mess begins. Eventually, everyone is afraid to make any changes, fearing that something might break, and as a result, nothing gets changed. The snowball keeps growing and becomes increasingly unmanageable. At some point, I got tired of it all and decided that we need to bring order, but in the least painful way for the developers.

We decided to go back to Ansible for automating small tasks needed to manage our infrastructure. In this case, the fear of causing harm was much less, and the code became more readable and understandable. Overall, I enjoyed it. So I decided to share my experience with you in creating such small playbooks for managing our infrastructure. In this article, we will create a VPC using Ansible.