I like to give props to cool services and products I’ve found helpful. Now I’m doing some DevOps work, a chap introduced me to a handy tool called PaperTrail (papertrailapp.com). It’s such a basic idea but so well executed that it’s gold if you’re looking after a few systems. In short, it’s a log aggregation service. I’m currently using it for a couple of systems but as we do a lot of work with a cloud service in Amazon, I’m planning to roll it out to the entire infrastructure. As we use Elastic Beanstalk, it’s really not super easy to get to the logs so we’d been using some custom tools to drop them to S3 and then have a look at them there. It works but it’s “meh”. Now with Papertrail, I should be able to drop all the logs to PT and group them by the many different environments we have. I’ve got some work to do on machine IDs (given that with Beanstalk, machines come and go) but I think it’ll be great.

Speaking of nifty tools, last week I came across the “extensions” capability for Elastic Beanstalk. There’s another “feature of WIN” (FoW). Using it, I was able to get Java7 installed on our beanstalk instances and get around the fact that the default AMIs only have Java 6 on them. In a previous project, we’d gone down the road of building our own AMI and quite frankly, it was a pain in the read end. This was before extensions existed though. Now, with extensions, I think it’d be pretty rare that one would need to build a custom AMI.

Finally, the NAB show is on this week in Vegas. For years, the chap I worked for tried to get me to go but I always said nah as I hate to fly. Finally, last year I went and totally loved it. It was long days in the booth and I was on setup and teardown but what a fantastic experience. Gutted I won’t be going this year but that’s the penalty for “JobScrewUpGATE 2013”.