Mirroring the production environment in Dev

When your production machine runs on AWS EC2 instances, and development is using VSCode DevContainers, no matter how much we resist, there are going to be situations where system services will need to be emulated. Something as simple as a cron job or a logrotate behaviour can become critical for re-creating customer reported issues.

We have been using Docker for years now to enable a light weight development environment. Recently, we ran a few setups with Docker based deployments. This resulted in different workflows for us. This blog comes from my attempt at bringing sanity to our test matrix, such that we can run everything that we do on the EC2 instance, inside the container. Essentially running systemd and crond inside the container as PS 1.

#docker #aws #development