DevOps

We hit a frustrating issue recently while building PHP images in AWS CodeBuild: composer install started failing, often, with an HTTP/2 400 from codeload.github.com while downloading a package archive. The package that failed changed from run to run, and the same Dockerfile and composer.lock that broke in one pipeline built cleanly in another. The short version is that this is GitHub wobbling rather than anything wrong in your project, that the same failure has come and gone for years, and that the usual environment-variable fixes only take the edge off. If your deployments run composer install, here is what is actually going on and how to stop it taking your builds down.

Validating an IaC template before you hand it to CloudFormation is one of the cheapest ways to avoid the dreaded UPDATE_ROLLBACK_IN_PROGRESS. You can catch a lot without ever creating a stack - but only if you understand what the tool you use actually checks. Here are the two we usually use, and where one stops and the other takes over.

A while back we wrote about our automatically updated docker image for cfn-lint - a public, daily-rebuilt image for cfn-lint that fills the gap left by the lack of an official one. Two changes have just landed in that build, and both are worth a few words: the images are now multiplatform, and we have fixed a problem that, from cfn-lint v1.52.0 onwards, left the image unable to recognise any resources.

Creating snapshots from EBS drives attached to your EC2 instances is the most basic way of backing up your data. While you have to be cautious when snapshotting running EC2 instances without restart, doing it regularly is a base of many disaster recovery plans. In the latest update to aws-maintenance repo on GitHub you’ll find a complete code and CloudFormation template that will make this as painless a process as possible.