Having started out on a Joyent appliance, migrating to Linode, and, finally, to Amazon with a Bitnami stack, we noticed the common pain of manually configuring each of these environments. Bitnami caused us an even bigger headache by being very difficult to update (apt-get doesn’t update the bitnami wrapped AMP stack). We decided to get [...]
Tools & Technology
In this section we talk about tools and technologies we use in our daily life building and operating web applications. Configuration management with Chef and Puppet, monitoring with tools like munin, nagios or cloud based tools, deployment with capistrano, Virtualization with Xen or on amazon EC2, and performance optimization of web sites are areas we deal with.
This is a guest post by Brian Doll, Application Performance Engineer at New Relic Six seconds can be an excruciatingly long time to wait for a single web page to load. Why does it take so long? Let’s take a look at each step of the timeline and see how we can make it faster. [...]
For my final post in freely acquiring, maintaining and monitoring a virtual root server, I’d like to introduce you to Cloudkick. They’ve had a major marketing campaign going on after being acquired by the folks from Rackspace. I actually clicked through one of their ads while browsing some headlines on Slashdot.
One of the nice features of opscode chef is it’s integration with cloud providers like amazon EC2. Knife, opscode chef’s command line client tool, makes it possible to create and bootstrap a VM in just one line – if you go through a few setup steps. In this article, I want to show you how [...]
We’ve invested quite some time in our WordPress Micro instance now. It’s definitely past the playing-around, prototype phase, so let’s get some automated backups in place. But, since we already suffered to get the EC2 API Tools installed, the hard part is actually done. Let’s get a couple of weekly cronjobs setup:
For the price, it’s hard to beat the EC2 Micro instance. But, if you have even a little bit of traffic, don’t expect to run a stock AMI without feeling some performance pain. After migrating this blog, we noticed that being logged in (meaning no wordpress cache hits) literally slowed the server down to a [...]
Recently, I had the unpleasant responsibility of stopping our development line. And it wasn’t just for a day or two. It was for a couple of months. The complexity of the codebase made every simple feature we added take weeks to implement, and I realized we were getting a negative return on our efforts. How [...]
After making the legwork to get your static resources running on S3, it’s really just a matter of throwing a few digital switches to get them into Amazon’s Cloudfront CDN. And why would you want to do this? Simple answer – performance. Amazon’s CDN has enough strategically located datacenters throughout the world to reach your [...]
We moved our static resources to S3 back in May of this year. The transition was so ‘simple’ and seemless that it’s hard to believe we’ve been using it for over 6 months now. Matthias is now thinking about doing the same and asked me for a howto including any pitfalls and caveats that I [...]
One small comment for Matthias, one giant leap for our testing infrastructure. In my last post about anti-fixes, I expressed my reservations about selenium test automation. Matthias mentioned the companies Sauce Labs and Cloud Testing maintained virtual test server farms so that I wouldn’t have to. Here’s why Sauce Labs made my choice super easy:
