Web server scenario

Goal

Automate the creation of a web server, and provide a healthcheck script to verify the server is up and responding correctly.

The Task

You are required to provision and deploy a new service in a cloud provider (let’s assume AWS). It must:

• Be publicly accessible, but only on port 80.
• Run Nginx.
• Serve a /version.txt file, containing only static text representing a version number, for example:

1.0.6

Prerequisites

You will want some AWS creds for an account you can work in.

Work

• Bootstrap and provision the server however you wish. Use user-data or a configuration management tool (such as Puppet, Chef or Ansible). Alternatively launch an idempotent AMI with packer and terraform, or even via the console.

• Provide a heatlhcheck script that can be run externally to periodically check if the server is up and serving the expected version number.

• Alter the README to contain the steps required to:

  • Create the server.
  • Run the healthcheck script.

Hints

If you want to run this exercise as time-boxed, these might shortcut the process by making it easier in the long-run so they might be worth considering before you start.

• Make the service resilient in 2 availability zones.
• Run Nginx inside a Docker container.

• Use the healthcheck script to start Nginx if it is not running.

    For example, you might decide to modify the script to SSH in to the instances and start if needed.
    Alternatively you might configure a process manager to use the script on the hosts themselves,
    such as supervisord or plain old systemd.