Bash script self-updates from github

Recently the systems engineering team @ Cloud9ers ($dayjob) has been busy building the infrastructure for a very ambitious and large scale project for one of our customers. The project involves tons of distributed programming besides lots of systems work as well. I'd like to share with the community a small tidbit of information. It's often some small things the one sometimes gives a moment to admire, and hereby share!

The problem

• We are building a private cloud. Ubuntu server instances running on that are cloned from a master template
• While most clouds provide what I call "Instance Identity" information through some pre-known web service URI, in our case we utilize VMware's "Invoke-VMScript" API to run scripts inside the cloned template, thus customizing it and giving it its identity, then puppet takes it from there. Note that we're using a simple vCenter+ESXi (no vCloud stuff here) no shared storage even!

Ok the real problem

• Editing the template, and publishing it across the cloud (a topic for another post) takes considerable time! I wanted a way to be able to quickly update my identity scripts without having to re-build and re-publish images

Solution

• A script with a trivially simple (thus mostly fixed) "bootstrap" section, which auto-updates itself from github and relaunches its-new-self!

Code

Nothing ground breaking, but still a cool trick eh! Yeah I could have added a broken this into multiple scripts and maybe run-parts them. Of-course this script is quite basic, but it's meant to remain that way since the heavy lifting is puppet's responsibility!
Note: To run this successfully the user this is run under, should have passwordless sudo rights to run "ip" and to run "itself" :) Got cool ideas, thoughts or comments? Leave me a message

Celebrating Cloud9ers is MEA's leading Amazon Consulting partner

It's been quite a while since I last blogged, I think it was over a year ago! I've been taking a break from blogging and focusing on Cloud Niners my baby startup that I co-founded with a bunch of life long friends.

While many things are interesting over here at Cloud Niners, this blog post is specifically to celebrate the fact that we've just been upgraded to become an Amazon Consulting Partner. I believe this makes us the first active middle-east Amazon AWS cloud consulting partner and certainly the best :) I do hear a lot from Amazon that we are the cloud leader in the middle-east! I am quite happy that we've achieved this milestone. I'm a big believer in cloud computing, and I simply enjoy helping our clients understand how the cloud (and Ubuntu server) can help them achieve more!

My team and I do custom cloud-application development, where we write top notch html5/CSS3/JS web applications that run and make use of the Amazon AWS scalable cloud infrastructure. We also do mobile applications backends and front-end (Android, iOS). We usually use the frankly excellent Ubuntu server, unless the customer forces us otherwise! Ubuntu server is simply the best OS for the cloud IMO. Our DevOps team helps our customers migrate and run their apps on the cloud (and on Ubuntu server) at top quality!

If you've read so far, here's a Gift for you! I'm offering my (and my team's) help (up-to-24hrs) for free in the next 30-days. If you're thinking about coding a custom cloud app, or have questions about any Amazon services, I'll give you free consultation and answer any questions. Shoot me a comment over here, or contact the team. Oh yeah, feel free to share this blog post with friends, to let them have the free goodies!