by Matthias Marschall on August 25, 2010 · 0 comments
I already wrote about how to get started with the Opscode Chef Platform. In this article I want to show you a very elegant way to deploy a Ruby on Rails stack with Chef. One of the strengths of Chef is the decent set of available cookbooks. @jtimberman does an especially excellent job in writing them. His chef cookbooks really help you to configure your systems neatly. One of his cookbooks is the Application cookbook. It enables data driven application deployment. Currently, it supports Ruby on Rails apps. The preferred stack is currently Matz Ruby with Unicorn, but, in a later post, I’ll show you how to use it cleanly with Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE).
Let’s get started!
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by Matthias Marschall on August 17, 2010 · 1 comment
by Matthias Marschall on August 10, 2010 · 4 comments
When inflexible and wasteful processes are making your organization inefficient, it’s time to introduce agile methodologies. Scrum vs. Kanban then becomes an essential question: Which one is better suited for my own situation?
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I’d recently ordered a new round of servers for NetDoktor and was positively dreading having to setup Nagios & Munin on them. This is where the fact that I’m a “born & raised” developer really shines through. The configuration of Nagios is simply beyond me. No matter how much documentation I read, I just can’t get all the pieces moving right. Try to bolt Munin on top of this and I simply walk away in frustration. There had to be a better way…
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by Matthias Marschall on July 29, 2010 · 2 comments
Every organization has to deal with a mix of ongoing and project oriented work. But, even if you structure your teams into departments to optimize ongoing work, they keep trying to self organize into project focused teams.
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by Matthias Marschall on July 20, 2010 · 0 comments
Browsers load static images from your website again and again if your web server does not send an expires header with a date far in the future. To avoid that unnecessary traffic on your servers and unnecessary load times for your users, it’s a good idea to let your nginx send those expires headers. But, what if you tell the browser not to come back for your css files until next year and now you change some style within it? The Rails URL helpers automatically attach a timestamp representing the last modification date to each URL (like ?2345346654). That changes the URL every time you deploy making the browser load the modified file. In this post, I want to show you all the not so obvious things to consider when you introduce far future expires headers with rails and nginx.
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by Matthias Marschall on July 13, 2010 · 1 comment
Getting Started With The Opscode Chef Platform – Configuration Management In The Cloud
In “The Moving Parts of Opscode Chef” there was an interesting discussion about the need of a highly available chef server if you want to use opscode chef as your configuration management tool of choice. Especially for small to medium sized enviroments running your own chef server is overkill. If you don’t want to use chef-solo (a local “push” tool instead of the client-server model of chef), you can sign up for an account at the opscode chef platform. The opscode chef platform gives you an highly available chef server in the cloud. After sign up, it’s only a matter of minutes to get your first client (or ‘node’ in chef speak) under configuration management control.
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by Matthias Marschall on July 6, 2010 · 2 comments
Scrum is a great framework for organizing projects. It defines exact roles and procedures to structure your work environment. You gain a lot of visibility and you empower your teams. All that is great. But in software development or operations it’s not sufficient. You need an underlying set of values and practices which drive quality and speed.
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by Matthias Marschall on June 29, 2010 · 1 comment
It’s hard to find the right structure for any organization. A lot of existing management wisdom comes from a time when you had to organize a physical work force. However, with today’s “knowledge workers” those structures don’t work as nicely anymore.
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by Matthias Marschall on June 22, 2010 · 3 comments
If you have a lot of big user stories, your velocity will jump up and down wildly. This makes it extremely difficult to tell when a user story will be done. Breaking down your huge user stories into smaller ones will help you smooth the flow and give you a clearer picture.
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