Cogini Blog
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Deploying an Elixir app to Digital Ocean with mix_deploy Port forwarding with iptablesElixir and embedded programming presentation
Here are the slides for the presentation on Elixir and embedded programming I gave to the Elixir LA user's group. It introduces embedded programming and how Elixir is a good match for a new generation of embedded systems. Read more…
Running Nerves on Amazon EC2
I have been looking into the best way to deploy Elixir in the cloud. As part of that, I have been building various AMIs with only the minimum needed to run an Elixir app. Nerves is a framework for building embedded systems in Elixir. Instead of running a general purpose … Read more…
Servers for beginners
Spinning up a server is easy enough, just go to Digital Ocean and push a button. But now you are responsible for your server. What does that mean? Read more…
The impact of network latency, errors, and concurrency on benchmarks
The goal of benchmarking is to understand the performance of our system and how to improve it. When we are making benchmarks, we need to make sure that they match real world usage. In my post on Benchmarking Phoenix on Digital Ocean, changing the concurrent connections and network latency had … Read more…
Managing app secrets with Ansible
In web applications we usually have a few things that are sensitive, e.g. the login to the production database or API keys used to access a third party API. We need to be particularly careful about how we manage these secrets, as they may allow attackers to access data … Read more…
Improving app security with the principle of least privilege
The security principle of "least privilege" means that apps should only have the permissions that they need to do their job, nothing more. If an attacker compromises your app, then they can't do anything outside of what the app would normally do. They may be able to break the application … Read more…
Running special versions of Erlang with ASDF and kerl
Configuring the ASDF version manager and kerl build release candidate and other special versions of Erlang Read more…
Deploying your Phoenix app to Digital Ocean for beginners
This is a gentle introduction to getting your Phoenix app up and running on a $5/month server at Digital Ocean. It starts from zero, assuming minimal experience with servers. Read more…
Benchmarking Phoenix on Digital Ocean
Just for fun, I decided to benchmark the performance of the elixir deploy template running on a $5/month Digital Ocean Droplet. Read more…
SaaS pricing: users are not all the same
It's popular these days to use hosted applications instead of running your own infrastructure. It's frustrating as a customer, though, when the pricing model is not sophisticated enough to match your actual usage. In a SaaS product, your pricing should scale with the value the customer gets from the product … Read more…