Meeting run by pietroalbini. Minutes written by pietroalbini.
Attending: alexcrichton, kennytm, Mark-Simulacrum, pietroalbini, shepmaster
Start of the conversation

Migrating crates.io behind CloudFront

While static.crates.io (hosting the source code of all the published crates) is behind CloudFront, that’s not true today for the crates.io web application. This causes problems because crates.io is hosted on Heroku, which requires pointing a CNAME to Heroku’s DNS. Unfortunately crates.io doesn’t use a subdomain, which prevents us from using CNAMEs. All our DNS zones are on AWS Route53, but AWS only supports CNAMEs on the apex pointing to other AWS resources. Because of that, the crates.io DNS was managed on a different service until today, causing maintenance issues on our end.

The solution we’re working towards is to put CloudFront in front of crates.io, and that will finally allow us to migrate the crates.io domain to AWS. pietroalbini is finishing the last infra touches, and we expect to deploy the changes in the coming days.

DNS management with Terraform

pietroalbini announced to the rest of the team that he started working on migrating the DNS records of our domains to Terraform. He already migrated the zones of cratesio.com and crates.io, and he plans to migrate the other ones over the coming weeks. pietroalbini also wrote documentation on this setup.

Another GitHub Actions CI configuration prototype

pietroalbini continued his investigation into another prototype for our new GitHub Actions configuration. To reiterate, GitHub Actions doesn’t support templates or includes, so the infrastructure team is looking into a way to reduce duplication between our pipelines.

Since the two prototypes presented at last week’s meeting weren’t liked by all the team, pietroalbini continued experimenting, and the prototype presented this week was based around YAML anchors, a standard YAML feature to reuse parts of data inside a single file. Unfortunately GitHub Actions explicitly disables YAML anchors, so pietroalbini wrote a small tool that pre-generates the expanded configuration file and commits it into the repo.

The team liked this approach much more, as it doesn’t introduce any new configuration syntax while keeping the configuration files in a manageable state. pietroalbini is going to polish the prototype and open a PR for it in the coming days.