Agile Web Development & Operations
Practical advice for rapidly delivering customer value
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.
The guys from peritor, who are the creators of webistrano, created an opscode chef based cloud management solution: Scalarium. Jonathan Weiss walked me through their solution, which helps to solve the issue of installing and dynamically configuring applications on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. In this post, I want to show you how they [...]
I’m currently using Github’s resque, a Redis backed Ruby library for creating and running asynchronous and scheduled jobs. As we’re running business critical jobs with the resque scheduler plugin, I really want to know via email if a job fails. In this post I want to share my solution for making resque send emails on [...]
After using LogicMonitor for almost two months now I’ve become quite comfortable with it’s interface and very secure with it’s monitoring. I’ve been asked by a few folks for some of the more technical details on it’s operation which I’ll share with you here.
The opscode chef bootstrap installs Matz Ruby on the node automatically. There are cookbooks for installing ruby enterprise edition on a node, but they create a separate Ruby “universe” on your box: You will have to be very careful how you install gems to make sure they are used by either the default Ruby or [...]
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 [...]
I’d recently ordered a new round of servers 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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
The Moving Parts Managing your infrastructure with Opscode Chef involves a few moving parts you need to be aware of. As I found it quite hard to differentiate, I want to share the basics with you:
It sounds like a simple thing to do: As Ubuntu does not have support for Xen by default, I wanted to run a Debian Lenny Server as Xen host (Dom0) with Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) LTS as guest (DomU). But there were some obstacles: debootstrap does not support Ubuntu Lucid by default Ubuntu Lucid cannot boot [...]
