Deploying Rails to AWS, Part 6

This is Part 6 of the Deploying Rails to AWS series. Here is Part 5 or you can start at the beginning, here is Part 1.

This will be last post of the Deploying Rails to AWS series to migrate the Billings Commuter Challenge to AWS. In this post, I'll briefly will cover the last few steps to fully migrate the Commuter Challenge to AWS.

The Last Few Steps

New Instance

I started with a fresh EC2 instance and attached an elastic IP and IAM role. I updated the IP in the configuration and ran kamal setup. This installed Docker, but it was missing some permissions to complete. I then added the user to the docker group, ran the setup again, created the DB and ran the migrations.

kamal setup
kamal app exec --primary -i 'bin/rails db:create'
kamal app exec --primary -i 'bin/rails db:migrate'

This all took less than ten minutes for a new server and running application. Awesome!

Data Migration

The data migration took the most time, mostly because I wasn't sure how to restore the dump to a containerized database. I used scp to copy the dump to the EC2 instance and ran a docker exec.

cat db_dump.dump | docker exec -i 8cfecabd6a25 pg_restore -d commuterchallenge_production

S3

For user profile pictures, events and incentives, I use Rail's Active Storage tools. I created an S3 bucket with a previously generated CFN template and then updated the ActiveStorage configuration in rails for production. Then I gave the role attached to the EC2 instance access to it. Digital Ocean's spaces is S3 compatible so there was little to change.

Postmark

All I needed to do was add the API key to the secrets manager and adjust the configuration to load it. This one tripped me up a little. The API key environment variable wasn't loading. I chased a red herring for a while, and it ended up being a typo in the ENV name. Whoops!

SSL

Setting up SSL in Rails and Kamal was a breeze. I updated the DNS records, updated the config to hosts instead of IPs and added ssl: true to the Kamal proxy configuration.

So easy! I really appreciate this feature of Kamal.

Conclusions

The Billings Commuter Challenge is now containerized and hosted on AWS!

Over this series, I explored building a full-fledged application in AWS with a three tiered VPC, EC2 instances, RDS, S3, auto-scaling, and an ALB. I made adjustments to save costs with our own NAT EC2 instance, and removing the high availability requirement. I tried ECS and containerized our application.

Yes, this took a long time and I thought about starting with Kamal. The size and usage of Billings Commuter Challenge just doesn't justify a HA architecture. I used it as opportunity to design and learn how do it. This was a fun way to dig into it and learn.

I have a few ideas where to go next. First, I should set up regular database backups. I want to continue improving coding with AI tools and I also have some ideas on for a small app with API Gateway, Dynamo DB, and Lambdas.