Helping web developers and operations bridge the deployment gap
From the category archives:
DevOps is an approach to bridge the gap between agile software development and operations. The DevOps tribe is a growing group of people practicing a new way of combining development and system administration for more speed, quality, revenues, and fun.
Recently, I was looking deeper into how we could add some automated acceptance tests to our Ruby on Rails based website. We’re using RSpec since quite a while now for TDD, but doing some high level acceptance tests was not on our agenda so far.
DRY Cucumber Scenarios
The new cool kid on the block is Cucumber. [...]
To run automated tests for your Ruby on Rails webapp, not only do you need your latest database structure deployed to the test database (created by rake db:test:prepare), but you also need some seed data for lookup tables, e.g. like zip codes.
Common approaches like adding seed data through rails migrations are discouraged, and plugins like [...]
When you’re running any business critical application, you need to know what’s going on with it. Is it up? Does it cause extended load on your servers? Does it have enough disk space left, how fast is the data on the disk growing, etc.
To know all that, you need a tool which a) monitors and [...]
We’re currently using Capistrano not only to deploy our Ruby on Rails application, but also to setup and manage our physical and virtual (Xen based) servers. We have Capistrano recipes for adding users, installing packages like apache or mysql, configuring a Xen VM and more. Coming accross puppet, I started to wonder about the essential [...]
