while(motivation <= 0)

With a couple days of extra break for Thanksgiving, I’ve been pondering what I should work on next. My adventures in C++ tend to be frustrating so I think I’ll give it a rest and spend some time working on the blog. That leaves the problem of what else I’d like to see the blog do. One problem that I’ve been having with uploading media to this blog is that some devices automatically save to Apple’s mov format vs the more universal mp4. I tried in the past to implement an automatic conversion on the web server itself. I got this working but it isn’t build for larger files, and it’s far to heavy a process for a web server. This morning I was thinking about using AWS Simple Queue service for this task, but I suspect that using that service would be overkill considering how simple it would be to write a batch job that ran on a container whose sole job would be to check a folder for mov files, convert them, and move them to the production bucket. I never got around to increasing the logging that I am doing on the blog too so this would also be a good opportunity for a bit of refactoring as well as refining of my existing processes and logging.

When implementing permissions for AWS ec2 instances, the way to go is IAM roles. Most of the time this is fine, sometimes it can be a pain. Please ignore anyone whom tells you to hard code AWS cli access creds into your code. To get started implementing WatchTower to ship my flask logs into aws I added the watchtower library to my project and then imported watchtower.
The actual code to implement WatchTower in my code:

# Configure the Flask logger
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
cloud_watch_stream_name = "vacuum_flask_log_{0}_{1}".format(platform.node(),timeobj.strftime("%Y%m%d%H%M%S"))
cloudwatch_handler = CloudWatchLogHandler(
    log_group_name='vacuum_flask',  # Replace with your desired log group name
    stream_name=cloud_watch_stream_name,  # Replace with a stream name
)
app.logger.addHandler(cloudwatch_handler)
app.logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)

IAM permissions required

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "logs:CreateLogGroup",
                "logs:CreateLogStream",
                "logs:PutLogEvents",
                "logs:DescribeLogStreams"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

Finishing touches

The last thing that proved to be an issue was that boto3 couldn’t find the default region in my containers. This has come up before but today was I was able to find a way around it by adding a default aws cli config file to my deployment and telling boto3 where to find it by using the environment variable AWS_CONFIG_FILE