I penetrated the impenetrable twaddle! After getting very frustrated last week with AWS security, I did some research, and finally found a description of a few things that I could understand. I now basically understand what a virtual private cloud is, and sort of how it works. That was really awesome news on Monday. Then on Tuesday we had some system problems at work and I got distracted sorting out other (AWS) stuff.
I was finally able to get back to the Express on Elastic Beanstalk project today. As I now understood the VPC stuff, I configured EB to use the VPC I already had. And then I commanded “Work now!” And behold, it did not.
I screwed around with it for a few hours, until I came to the conclusion that the reason it wasn’t working was because it thought it wasn’t working. No really, that makes sense.
Elastic Beanstalk is designed for implementing a web site (which looks like one computer) by using a bunch of computers in the background. If one of those bunch of computers goes bad for some reason, EB throws it out and replaces it with a new one. So to do this, EB has to know how to tell whether one of those computers is bad. And for a long time, I had that wrong.
However even after sorting that out, I still can’t get it to work. I’m beginning to suspect it’s a networking problem again – although Express “works” when I run it on my own machine, it doesn’t work when I connect to either the load balancer (the part of EB which farms work off to the worker machines) nor when I try to connect to the individual machines. My recollection from how we do this at work is that *should* work. So I’m back trying to figure out networking. And since I have known that stuff since Monday, I thought I got it…
I’ve also been considering whether I should actually get back to working on functionality (i.e. pretty things) instead of this AWS navel-gazing. But I should not. The bill for October (which I still have not blogged about) was a bit high, and I need to get this project working to cut down the costs. While it’s costing me too much, this project is at risk, so I need to get that stuff sorted.
The good news is that I was plagued by problems like this for about a year while I was trying to get this project off the ground, and with perseverance and experience I managed to figure them out. I feel like I”m making progress, even if it’s just developing a callus where I’m bashing my head on the wall.
