Automate the creation of a web server, and provide a healthcheck script to verify the server is up and responding correctly.

You are required to provision and deploy a new service in the cloud provider of your choice (AWS, Azure etc.). It must:

• Be publicly accessible, but only on port 80.
• Run Nginx.
• Serve a /version.txt file, containing only static text representing a version number, for example:

1.0.6

Fork this repository.

• Provide instructions on how to create the server.

• Bootstrap and provision the server however you wish. Use user-data or a configuration management tool (such as Puppet, Chef or Ansible). Alternatively launch an idempotent AMI with packer and terraform, or even via the console. Be prepared to justify your decision!

• Provide a healthcheck script that can be run externally to periodically check if the server is up and serving the expected version number.

• Alter the README to contain the steps required to:

  • Create the server.
  • Run the healthcheck script.

Feel free to ask questions as you go if anything is unclear, confusing, or just plain missing.

This exercise is time-boxed, but if any of these shortcut the process by making it easier in the long-run they might be worth considering up front. We won't mark you down for not doing the extra credits, but if you want to give them a go...

• Make the service resilient in 2 availability zones.

• Run Nginx inside a Docker container.

• Use the healthcheck script to start Nginx if it is not running.

    For example, you might decide to modify the script to SSH in to the instances and start if needed.
    Alternatively you might configure a process manager to use the script on the hosts themselves,
    such as supervisord or plain old systemd.
  

Any you like. You’ll have to justify your decision. Please pick something you're familiar with, as you'll need to be able to discuss it.

Scripting skills, elegance, understanding of the technologies you use, security, documentation.

Definitely not. This can be the dirtiest, most unsecure server provisioned. But be prepared to explain why you wouldn't allow this into production and how you might harden it in a real world scenario.

Absolutely. Hopefully this will emerge as we pair and converse. But feel free to comment your code, or put explanations in a pull request within the repo.