Helping web developers and operations bridge the deployment gap
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Automatically setting up and maintaining my servers is a must for me. Only if everything I install and configure on a server is scripted I’m sure I know what’s there and that it stays that way. Having automated infrastructure enables me to schedule a critical setup change at 3 am and be on the safe [...]
In my post about Carpet is a re-mix of existing configuration management solutions, I gave you a rough overview of the problems I tried to address with Carpet. In this article, I want to show you how you can set up a complete Ruby on Rails stack with only a few lines of configuration while [...]
Migrating our production environment from debian to OpenSolaris I wanted to simplify our configuration management recipes along the way. What I came up with is a mixture of Puppet style manifests and Capistrano backed ease of use in a new open source project called: Carpet.
This is a guest post by Andrew Shafer, who is part of Reductive Labs, the people behind Puppet. Reductive Labs is helping people build better systems with better tools and processes. Andrew has been on several Agile software teams in various capacities for the past few years, and has a passion for applying Agile principles [...]
How do you decide who in the company should have access to the test and production environments? Opening it up to everyone is one extreme which in today’s security sensitive world is no longer an option. At the far other end, granting only one person access, while perhaps more secure (depending on who you’ve entrusted [...]
As I mentioned in my short comparison of Puppet vs. Capistrano, we’re currently using Capistrano not only for deployment and live monitoring of our application, but also for configuration management.
Using How-To Documents For Configuration Management
Before getting started with Capistrano, I used to write very detailed how-to documents to make sure that I didn’t need to [...]
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 [...]
After years spent working with Cfengine, Luke Kanies decided to form the company Reductive Labs in 2005 and Puppet, a long time idea and quickly stabilizing prototype, was born. He describes it as an open-source, next-generation server automation tool. Configuration files (called manifests) are written declaratively, and there is a client/server model for distribution handling. [...]
As promised in my last post about configuration management, I want to introduce you to one of the key Open Source configuration management players on the scene today – Cfengine. Embarked upon in 1993 by Mark Burgess, Cfengine has helped system administrators configuring and maintaining their servers in the data center for over a decade [...]
The Velocity 2008 Conference hosted many excellent presentations and discussions concerning web performance and operations. Adam Jacob, of HJK Solutions, presented how his company goes about “Building An Automated Infrastructure”. To briefly explain what an automated infrastructure is, let’s think of servers and data as office buildings and automobiles. Would it make sense to begin [...]
