Between Google I/O and Microsoft Build it was a busy week, and then there were other interesting releases as well. Too much to choose from so today I’ll focus on some dev tools. Which in this case means GitHub’s new Package Registry, Microsoft’s WSL 2 and new terminal, and sharing encrypted AMIs across accounts in AWS.
GitHub Package Registry
GitHub released a package registry. In case it’s not entirely clear what that is, it’s basically a place to store your compiled and/or packaged code ready for distribution. Two of the best-known package registries out there are npm, for JavaScript libraries, and Docker Hub, for Docker containers. GitHub offers alternatives for both of these
I like to think that this is a good move on GitHub’s part. Obviously it ties in with GitHub Actions in a strategy to provide a complete solution for the development pipeline. And I can’t really find a fault with that. All of this ties together well, and having a single place to store these artefacts makes things easier. It’s certainly easier for a small team
Now, is it perfect? I haven’t had a chance to play with it, but I suspect not as it’s still in a public beta
WSL 2 and a Terminal
One downside that Windows has had in the past
This need was first addressed by the release of WSL
Together with this, there is also the new terminal client they released at the same time. While not very exciting in itself
Cross-Account Encrypted AMIs
Stop me if you’ve been in this situation before. You use AWS and have separate accounts for production and non-prod, as well as yet another one for your CI/CD tooling. You bake your AMIs for deployments in your CI/CD account and as you’re security conscious that means you wish to deploy the same encrypted AMI to both your non-prod and production accounts. And then you realise that you can’t share encrypted AMIs and have to build in workarounds that involve encrypting the AMI in the target account.
Personally I’ve had this situation crop up regularly
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They are far from the first to do so. ↩︎
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There may well be a point where controlling your own registries will be worth it. ↩︎
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Limited, so sign up now and hopefully you won’t have to wait too long to get access. ↩︎
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In my opinion at least. ↩︎
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Windows Subsystem for Linux, I still feel that the name is backwards. ↩︎
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Although it is open source. ↩︎
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Yes, obviously, after the first time I knew about the need for workarounds from the start. ↩︎
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Always a best practice thing. ↩︎
Read more like this:
- Week 33, 2019 - AWS Lake Formation; Aurora Multi-Master; GitHub Actions Update
- Week 43, 2018 - GitHub Actions; GitHub Suggested Changes
- Week 24, 2018 - Microsoft Acquires GitHub; Siri Shortcuts; Amazon EKS
- Week 21, 2018 - Amazon Aurora Backtrack; SAM init; GitHub Checks API
- GitHub Actions - Awesome Automation
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