Month: December 2016

End of Year Gotchas

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Mac OS Sierra Git Broken After Upgrade:

Every year when a new Mac OS is released I am excited to see what new features have come down the pipe but also fearful of what is going to break. Without fail ever release since Mavericks has broken something in my environment whether it be DevOps related or Audio Engineering related. This time around it was xcode which impacted my ability to use git bash. Fortunately the fix was easy and quick.

Below is the error I received the first time I used git bash after updating.

xcrun: error: invalid active developer path (/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools), missing xcrun at: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/xcrun

Resolution:

xcode-select --install

If this doesn’t resolve for you try using the –reset flag instead of –install

AWS Lambda Invocation Limits:

I’ve had the privilege of doing DevOps work for a few fairly popular mobile games over the past 6 months. About 3-4 months ago we made the switch from Tomcat backend servers and SQL to using Amazon RDS and Lambda with API Gateway. This has proven to drastically reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and make scaling a breeze. The challenge came when we started to grow the number of Lambda functions and encountered a not so widely known limitation. Lambda has a limit of 100 requests per second, which is honestly quite a bit, however this is GLOBAL not per Lambda. The more Lambda functions you have in your account the more this will grow. I have since requested 2 increases from Amazon to prevent throttling and setup some global CloudWatch dashboards and alarms, but this is valuable information I wish I knew before limitations were encountered.

Happy Holidays and 2nd Blog-Anniversary

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Well, its that time of year again where snow is upon us and houses are filled with families celebrating the Holidays. 2 years ago I started this blog while working as a systems admin at a small company finding my path in the IT world and posting lessons I’ve learned along the way. Over the past 2 years my career has grown from a virtualization and Windows admin to working as an Operations Engineer for a hosting company primarily working on Linux systems and various hypervisors. I’ve now found myself in a DevOps role as a cloud engineer working on high availability cloud architecture for household name entertainment companies. Blogging has been a passion of mine throughout my career as i have relied on the blogs of others as well as documentation to find my way out of difficult issues. For things I’ve run into that weren’t terribly intuitive I felt it my responsibility to contribute back to the community in hopes that I can save someone else the same headache I went through to fix an issue. As I come to the 2nd anniversary of the blog I just want to say thank you to all who have come here and read posts and wish all of you happy holidays and happy new year. Also if you’re an IT professional I highly encourage you to blog and contribute back to the community, even if you feel like you don’t have much to contribute, I guarantee you do.