https://mcginniscommawill.com/tags/aws/ Recent content in Aws on McGinnis, Will Hugo en-us Sun, 13 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://mcginniscommawill.com/posts/2017-08-13-modernizing-pedalwrencher-whatever-means/ Sun, 13 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://mcginniscommawill.com/posts/2017-08-13-modernizing-pedalwrencher-whatever-means/ <p>I&rsquo;ve got a side project that I&rsquo;ve maintained (badly) for the past couple of years, <a href="http://www.pedalwrencher.com/">pedalwrencher.com</a>. It&rsquo;s a pretty simple idea, if you ride bikes, and use <a href="http://strava.com/">strava.com</a>, you can sign up with pedalwrencher and set up mileage based alerts. So if you want to replace you chain every 2000 miles, you can get an email or SMS message (via <a href="https://www.twilio.com/">twilio</a>) every 2000 miles with that reminder. Pretty straight forward.</p> <p>Architecturally, it was originally built as a single flask app backed by <a href="https://www.postgresql.org/">PostgreSQL</a>, running on <a href="http://www.heroku.com/">Heroku</a>. Separately there was a tiny EC2 box with a cron job running to do the actual batch processing to send out notifications once an hour. This was a pretty simple way to get things up and running, but the reality of a side project is that it&rsquo;s not getting babysat. If I get busy and am not riding personally, things can break, the cron job can fail and I may not know about it. And that&rsquo;s basically what happened. I didn&rsquo;t have any kind of good monitoring or error reporting set up, so something silently failed for a couple of months before I started getting some user emails about it.</p>