+ Start of lewdlad bot post

posts/lewd-lad-infra.md

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+# Lewdlad the Cronjob that became a bot and orchestrates AWS Instances
+
+## What is "Lewdlad"
+
+Lewdlad is a Discord chat bot I created which (at the time of writing this) is used to orchestrate multiple AWS EC2 servers to provide affordable game servers to various communities that I help run.
+
+### Some history
+
+The very first version of Lewdlad was a python script that would literally pick random images from a set of red boards on 4chan and send it to a random online person in the guild.
+Eventually I created a bot(that had 1 command), that would invoke this script and send the results to whoever invoked the command.
+That command is `.roll`. 
+After some time I added some more 4chan related commands and eventually _the Hanime module_.
+
+The Hanime module is weird because it was conceived out of a joke: "what if Lewdlad recommended some fire hentai".
+Being that it was likely 2 AM and I was bored I did some searching and found that there is no public API for Hanime.
+I then opened up the site and did some reverse engineering to figure out how to spoof a browser request and get some results.
+Some reversing and trial-and-error later and I had a working request script, and could search.
+Finally I took this script, wrapped with some ergonomics and hooked it into the Lewdlad's codebase.
+
+### The beginnings of orchestration 
+
+Around this time I started hosting a minecraft server for friends to play on.
+Being that the server had limited _burst capacity_ I knew I had to make sure the server could replenish its burst for when the _peak hours_ hit.
+To achieve this I put Lewdlad on the same server as the minecraft game files and put the `start-minecraft.sh` script behind a command for Lewdlad to use.
+
+The architecture was surprisingly simple and ended up being way more flexible and easy to use than I ever expected.
+Basically each game had its own directory in a predetermined directory:
+
+```
+Lewdlad/
+	<code and things>
+Games/
+	Minecraft/
+		discord-bot.json
+		start.sh
+		<game files>
+	ReflexArena/
+		discord-bot.json
+		start.sh
+		stop.sh
+		<game files>
+	CS:Source/
+		<game files>
+
+```
+
+The advantage of this structure above is that only directories with that `discord-bot.json` configuration file would ever be picked up by the bot.
+It was also really easy to setup since you only needed a `start.sh` script and optionally a `stop.sh` script since Lewdlad had its own _nuke-all-the-things-function_ in its own back-end.
+This meant a minimal configuration could look like 
+
+```
+{
+	"name": "some server",
+	"id": "name of parent directory",
+	"script": "start.sh"
+	// These below are added by the bot
+	"pid": <process id here>,
+	"active": true|false,
+}
+```
+
+Adding crash safety is trivially easy as recovering is a matter of checking configuration files and determining which are _falsely active_.
+
+