That’s the second part. If I’m troubleshooting by logging into EC2 instances, there is something wrong with my logging infrastructure. That’s actually the larger issue.
SSH access is absolutely a last resort, but can be necessary in certain cases (like when Filebeat breaks...). Turning SSH off completely (i.e. "No SSH") is certainly better for security and something we may pursue.
I mentioned in another comment here that SSH is just one example, we can also easily hit endpoints with curl via hostname.
Also mentioned in the post are other tools (like Grafana dashboards) have an expectation of unique hostnames.
Of course there are other ways both using AWS and third party services. Centralized logging is a solved problem.
AWS isn’t going to run out of disk space any time soon. You could also use a lifecycle policy to delete old logs or move them to a lower cost storage depending on your retention policy.
I’m not saying that I have never had to log on to a VM to troubleshoot, but that’s a sign of the need of better logging.
And if my logging infrastructure isn’t good, how pray tell will I troubleshoot my programs running on Lambda or Fargate?
It’s not a problem at all with lambda or Fargate. Logging can be as simple as printing to the console and they go to CloudWatch.
It’s the same concept. If you’re troubleshooting at any point involves needing to log in to an EC2 instance, you might as well have a few bespoke servers called “Web01” and “Web02”. You’re just using ASG to create pets at scale. We run an ASG in production that scales from 2 to 30 instances based on the number of messages in a queue, lambdas running all of the time, some a Fargate tasks etc. it would be a nightmare to troubleshoot all of those processes without centralized, queryable logs.
In my experience, Fargate isn't very commonly used and Lambda is used for only relatively simple things.
And that experience is representative of the entire AWS ecosystem?
SSH access is absolutely a last resort, but can be necessary in certain cases (like when Filebeat breaks...). Turning SSH off completely (i.e. "No SSH") is certainly better for security and something we may pursue.
I mentioned in another comment here that SSH is just one example, we can also easily hit endpoints with curl via hostname.
Also mentioned in the post are other tools (like Grafana dashboards) have an expectation of unique hostnames.