We’ve teamed up with Packt Publishing to organize a giveaway of their new book “Continuous Delivery and DevOps: A Quickstart Guide” as a holiday gift to you our readers! Four lucky winners stand a chance to win copies of this new book. Keep reading to find out how you can be one of them.
Continuous Integration (CI)
This process combines the logical separation of a build server and an integration server into one critical stage of software development. Through test driven development, developers and QA teams increase their software quality management. The Hudson continuous integration server (now known as Jenkins) is perhaps one of the most widely used open-source variants.
Although we’ve skirted around the edges of Continuous Deployment on this blog, we haven’t really gone into any details. The main reason for this is simply that neither Matthias nor myself have ever continuously deployed to our production environments. How hard could it be? Well, like with most engineering endeavors, it’s about 99% preparation and [...]
Even today, in the 21st century, it’s rare for CEOs to steer their companies into agile waters. Change is hard, scary and leads into the unknown and changing an entire organization compounds all these fears. But, there are subtle, yet significant, ways in which you can organize your own work to be much more agile. [...]
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:
Matthias and I started this blog over a year ago because we had first-hand experiences with the rift between developers and sysadmins. We knew this was a lose-lose situation not only for those directly involved, but the companies they were working for as well. We’ve described many real-life examples of how to overcome this rift, [...]
John Allspaw and Paul Hammond did a great presentation at Velocity 2009 about the tools and culture at Flickr, which enable them to do 10+ deploys per day. My favorite quote is: Ops’ job is NOT to keep the site stable and fast [but] Ops’ job is it to enable the business (this is the [...]
For developing our Ruby on Rails based web site, we usually take regular SQL dumps from our production servers (of course, anonymizing sensitive customer data along the way). Always having a fresh dump allows us to be on the safe side when writing database migrations. Having an up to date development database enables us to [...]
Why do programmers code, priorities, how to assess a programmers competency and continuos integration cage fight – some food for thought… Programmers Don’t Like to Code (Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch) – A very insightful article about why programmers keep re-writing code: To understand, and, after understanding, to simplify. Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities (Merlin [...]
This is a guest post by Patrick Debois, the author of JEDI: Just Enough Developed Infrastructure. I stumbled across Patrick early last year while searching desperately for some relevant topics on “agile operations”. One amusing, yet poignant, hit was the lost use cases of Operations. Agile Web Operations didn’t even exist at the time, but [...]
