Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Last Updated on April 18, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta I want to thank, each reader, and follower of automationchampion.com, for their support and feedback(s). Some of you requested me to write a blog post to explain (1) MALFORMED_ID Error; and, (2) how to solve it.  I have and will continue to, try
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Last Updated on April 18, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta Big Idea or Enduring Question: How do you resolve the FIELD_INTEGRITY_EXCEPTION error?  The Record-Triggered Flow is a way of automating business processes. Record-Triggered Flow is a powerful tool for system administrators and developers to implement business processes without writing code. However, with great power comes
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Earth Day is one of the (many) days when businesses can create or reaffirm a commitment to practicing sustainability. Business owners must take time out to create awareness, especially when climate action is more important than ever.Along with the environmental implications, sustainability is growing in awareness among consumers. A 2021 study by Deloitte found that 34 percent of consumers choose brands that have environmentally sustainable practices.Here are some ideas for small businesses looking to highlight Earth Day on Instagram.Keep it simple with an informative message.Sometimes, a simple approach is better than an elaborate campaign, especially when there’s an important message to get across. So these brands decided to take the simple route, with a bit of their own added flair.Agnes LDN, a fashion brand aiming to educate its customers about sustainability, shared an Earth Day post with a simple but effective message. They ask readers not to focus only on the discounts and offers on Earth Day but also on its core themes of environmental restoration. They also highlight a creator, Poppy Okotcha, an ecological home-grower based out of the U.K., who shares information about foraging and regeneration gardening on her Instagram. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Agnes LDN (@agnesldn) On the other hand, Reclaim Wellness, a sustainable self-care brand, offered a discount (15 percent off on all their products) and shared ways users could be more sustainable daily. Some of their tips include growing some of your own produce, recycling, and upcycling clothing. View this post on Instagram A post shared by reclaim Wellness (@reclaim.ng) You can choose to share how your product helps people cultivate sustainable habits as Circular & Co, a reusable cups brand did in their Earth Day post. The team member that wrote the post highlighted that his own reusable coffee cup had saved ~85 disposable cups from the landfill, a great example of small changes making a big difference. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Circular&Co. (@circularandco) Or, you might share the different ways your brand practices sustainability as natural skincare brand Cln and Drty did in their Reel. The Reel specifically highlighted reusing leftover products as samples and recycling at all points of production. View this post on Instagram A post shared by CLN&DRTY Natural Skincare | self care is mental health care (@clnanddrty) Whatever you choose to do, remember to keep Earth Day and its core purpose –   making life more sustainable – at the forefront of your messaging.💡Practical Tip: Here are some resources from EarthDay.org, the world’s largest recruiter to the environmental movement that can help you make the most of Earth Day.Highlight or collaborate with another sustainable brand or creatorEarth Day is all about working together as a community to improve the state of the world. Focus on the community aspect by highlighting someone else like a brand or creator doing great work in the sustainability space by giving them a platform to let their voice and vision be heard.Love Stories Bali, a sustainable fashion brand highlighted Closed Loop, a sustainable fashion consultancy in their Earth Day post. They spoke about the brand’s sustainability efforts and shared images and videos of Closed Loop’s work to upcycle used clothing. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Love Stories Bali (@love.stories.bali) Whiskers Laces, an environmentally-friendly shoelace business, took a similar approach, highlighting a digital tool called Ethicli that helps people practice sustainable shopping in their post. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Whiskers (@whiskerslaces) 💡Practical Tip: There are many ways to collaborate. You can do an Instagram takeover with a creator focused on sustainability. Or you might just pick up the activities of a fellow brand in the sustainability space and put a spotlight on them.Conduct a giveawayIn the days leading up to Earth Day, you can plan to give away some products or services if that’s a good fit for your business. A giveaway can be a simple way to create engagement for your brand and create awareness around Earth Day. That’s the approach these three brands took, asking participants to like the post, follow both brands on Instagram, and tag a friend in the comments.Grandy Organics, an organic food company, partnered with Eco Bags US, the long-time reusable bag brand for a giveaway. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Grandy Organics (@grandyorganics) Tegaa a sustainable resort wear brand, partnered with Maya’s Cookies, a vegan cookie brand to give away their products. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Maya’s Cookies (@mayascookiessandiego) Three Alaska-based companies – Alaska Glacial, Alpine Fit, and Elevate Art Studio collaborated to give their products away in the days leading up to Earth Day. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Kelsey Fagan (@elevate_art_studio) 💡Practical Tip: You don’t have to only giveaway using one format. You can do a giveaway that requires less effort on the customers’ part, including a free item in every order made on Earth Day or during that week or month.Donate your profitsIn the weeks or days leading up to Earth Day, consider offering a promo on your products and donating the proceeds or a portion of them to a good cause.Grandy Organics is donating 10 percent of its profits to Appalachian Mountain Club, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the outdoors. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Grandy Organics (@grandyorganics) Sense of Shelf donated 100 percent of their profits to black-led farming organizations, with information about why in their Earth Day post. They also encourage their audience to forgo shopping and instead support the farms directly if they can do so. View this post on Instagram A post shared by SENSE of SHELF (@sense.of.shelf) If you’re on the hunt for organizations to donate to, here at Buffer we’ve vetted and donated to environmental charities in the past like Cool Earth and VertueLab. You can also check out Giving Green to help you find the right cause that aligns with your brand’s values.💡Practical Tip: Donating large amounts can be a big ask for many small businesses, but if you have any deadstock or cash that you can donate, that works great.Encourage followers to participate in sustainable activitiesThe impact of Earth Day needs to be felt physically and online. As a brand, you can encourage people to participate in more local activities that practically help improve the environment.Sense of Shelf did an IG takeover with Tuesdays for Trash, an environmental conservation organization. The post encouraged people to clean up their neighborhoods and take a selfie to be entered into a raffle. View this post on Instagram A post shared by SENSE of SHELF (@sense.of.shelf) 💡Practical Tip: There are great Earth Day activities for every type of business, even if you have a primarily local audience. Consider organizing cleanups of a local beach or park or a recyclables collection event.Practice what you preach when it comes to sustainabilityAside from being active on social media, it’s essential to keep practicing sustainability throughout the year. Make it a core part of your business ethos, from paying your workers fairly to recycling materials.Greenvelope’s Earth Day post reflects this as they share a simple message about their efforts to be a sustainable company. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Greenvelope | Online Invites (@greenvelope) What are your favorite Earth Day campaigns from small businesses? Tag us on Twitter and Instagram to let us know!

At Buffer, we’ve been working on a better admin dashboard for our customer advocacy team. This admin dashboard included a much more powerful search functionality. Nearing the end of the project’s timeline, we’ve been prompted with the replacement of managed Elasticsearch on AWS with managed Opensearch. Our project has been built on top of newer versions of the elasticsearch client which suddenly didn’t support Opensearch.To add more fuel to the fire, OpenSearch clients for the languages we use, did not yet support transparent AWS Sigv4 signatures. AWS Sigv4 signing is a requirement to authenticate to the OpenSearch cluster using AWS credentials.This meant that the path forward was riddled with one of these optionsLeave our search cluster open to the world without authentication, then it would work with the OpenSearch client. Needless to say, this is a huge NO GO for obvious reasons.Refactor our code to send raw HTTP requests and implement the AWS Sigv4 mechanism ourselves on these requests. This is infeasible, and we wouldn’t want to reinvent a client library ourselves!Build a plugin/middleware for the client that implements AWS Sigv4 signing. This would work at first, but Buffer is not a big team and with constant service upgrades, this is not something we can reliably maintain.Switch our infrastructure to use an elasticsearch cluster hosted on Elastic’s cloud. This entailed a huge amount of effort as we examined Elastic’s Terms of Service, pricing, requirements for a secure networking setup and other time-expensive measures.It seemed like this project was stuck in it for the long haul! Or was it?Looking at the situation, here are the constants we can’t feasibly change.We can’t use the elasticsearch client anymore.Switching to the OpenSearch client would work if the cluster was open and required no authentication.We can’t leave the OpenSearch cluster open to the world for obvious reasons.Wouldn’t it be nice if the OpenSearch cluster was open ONLY to the applications that need it?If this can be accomplished, then those applications would be able to connect to the cluster without authentication allowing them to use the existing OpenSearch client, but for everything else, the cluster would be unreachable.With that end goal in mind, we architected the following solution.Piggybacking off our recent migration from self-managed Kubernetes to Amazon EKSWe recently migrated our computational infrastructure from a self-managed Kubernetes cluster to another cluster that’s managed by Amazon EKS.With this migration, we exchanged our container networking interface (CNI) from flannel to VPC CNI. This entails that we eliminated the overlay/underlay networks split and that all our pods were now getting VPC routable IP addresses.This will become more relevant going forward.Block cluster access from the outside worldWe created an OpenSearch cluster in a private VPC (no internet-facing IP addresses). This means the cluster’s IP addresses would not be reachable over the internet but only to internal VPC routable IP addresses.We added three security groups to the cluster to control which VPC IP addresses are allowed to reach the cluster.Build automations to control what is allowed to access the clusterWe built two automations running as AWS lambdas.Security Group Manager: This automation can execute two processes on-demand.-> Add an IP address to one of those three security groups (the one with the least number of rules at the time of addition).-> Remove an IP address everywhere it appears in those three security groups.Pod Lifecycle Auditor: This automation runs on schedule and we’ll get to what it does in a moment.How it all connects togetherWe added an InitContainer to all pods needing access to the OpenSearch cluster that, on-start, will execute the Security Group Manager automation and ask it to add the pod’s IP address to one of the security groups. This allows it to reach the OpenSearch cluster.In real life, things happen and pods get killed and they get new IP addresses.Therefore, on schedule, the Pod Lifecycle Auditor runs and checks all the whitelisted IP addresses in the three security groups that enable access to cluster. It then checks which IP addresses should not be there and reconciles the security groups by asking the Security Group Manager to remove those IP addresses. Here is a diagram of how it all connects togetherDiagram for our solution to tackling Opensearch access problems through automated whitelisting, source: Peter Emil on behalf of Buffer’s Infrastructure TeamExtra GotchasWhy did we create three security groups to manage access to the OpenSearch cluster?Because security groups have a maximum limit of 50 ingress/egress rules. We anticipate that we won’t have more than 70-90 pods at any given time needing access to the cluster. Having three security groups sets the limit at 150 rules which feels like a safe spot for us to start with.Do I need to host the Opensearch cluster in the same VPC as the EKS cluster?It depends on your networking setup! If your VPC has private subnets with NAT gateways, then you can host it in any VPC you like. If you don’t have private subnets, you need to host both clusters in the same VPC because VPC CNI by default NATs VPC-external pod traffic to the hosting node’s IP address which invalidates this solution. If you turn off the NAT configuration, then your pods can’t reach the internet which is a bigger problem.If a pod gets stuck in CrashLoopBackoff state, won’t the huge volume of restarts exhaust the 150 rules limit?No, because container crashes within a pod get restarted with the same IP address within the same pod. The IP Address isn’t changed.Aren’t those automations a single-point-of-failure?Yes they are, which is why it’s important to approach them with an SRE mindset. Adequate monitoring of these automations mixed with rolling deployments is crucial to having reliability here. Ever since these automations were instated, they’ve been very stable and we didn’t get any incidents. However, I sleep easy at night knowing that if one of them breaks for any reason I’ll get notified way before it becomes a noticeable problem.ConclusionI acknowledge that this solution isn’t perfect but it was the quickest and easiest solution to implement without requiring continuous maintenance and without delving into the process of on-boarding a new cloud provider.Over to youWhat do you think of the approach we adopted here? Have you encountered similar situations in your organization? Send us a tweet!