Aaron VanSledright

Author: Aaron VanSledright

  • A File Extraction Project

    I had a client approach me regarding a set of files they had. The files were a set of certificates to support their products. They deliver these files to customers in the sales process. The workflow currently involves manually packaging the files up into a deliverable format. The client asked me to automate this process…

  • A Self Hosted Server Health Check

    I’m not big on creating dashboards. I find that I don’t look at them enough to warrant hosting the software on an instance and having to have the browser open to the page all the time. Instead, I prefer to be alerted via Slack as much as possible. I wrote scripts to collect DNS records…

  • Collecting DNS Records from Route53

    I had an idea the other day to query my web servers to get a response code and potentially alert me based on the result. Ideally, I would get a Slack notification on any response that is not “200”. I was thinking that I could run this either on a CRON so that I have…

  • Where Is It 5 O’Clock Pt: 4

    As much as I’ve scratched my head working on this project it has been fun to learn some new things and build something that isn’t infrastructure automation. I’ve learned some frontend web development some backend development and utilized some new Amazon Web Services products. With all that nice stuff said I’m proud to announce that…

  • Where Is It Five O’Clock Pt: 3

    So I left this project at a point where I felt it needed to be re-architected based on the fact that Flask only executes the function once and not every time the page loads. I re-architected the application in my head to include an API that calls the Lambda function and returns a list of…

  • Where Is It 5 O’Clock Pt: 2

    So I spend the evening deploying this web application to Amazon Web Services. In my test environment, everything appeared to be working great because every time I reloaded the page it reloaded the function as well. When I transferred this over to a live environment I realized the Python function only ran every time I…

  • Where Is It Five O’Clock Pt: 1

    I bought the domain whereisitfiveoclock.net a while back and have been sitting on it for quite some time. I had an idea to make a web application that would tell you where it is five o’clock. Yes, this is a drinking website. I saw this project as a way to learn more Python skills, as…

  • EC2 Action Slack Notification

    I took a brief break from my Lambda function creation journey to go on vacation but, now i’m back! This function will notify a Slack channel of your choosing when an EC2 instance enters “Starting, Stopping, Stopped, or Shutting-Down” status. I thought this might be useful for instances that reside under a load balancer. It…

  • Check EC2 Instance Tags on Launch

    In my ever-growing quest to automate my AWS infrastructure deployments, I realized that just checking my tags wasn’t good enough. I should force myself to put tags in otherwise my instances won’t launch at all. I find this particularly useful because I utilize AWS Backup to do automated snapshots nightly of all of my instances.…

  • AWS Tag Checker

    I wrote this script this morning as I was creating a new web server. I realized that I had been forgetting to add my “Backup” tag to my instances so that they would automatically be backed up via AWS Backup. This one is pretty straight forward. Utilizing Boto3 this script will iterate over all of…