Helping web developers and operations bridge the deployment gap
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 [...]
It all began a year ago. We wanted to introduce a new navigation bar, but gradually, gaining feedback (and confidence) that it was the right upgrade for our users. My idea at that time was a random cookie which would show 20% of our users the new navigation while giving them a separate google analytics [...]
Scaleability is a term near and dear to a CTO’s heart. It’s also the most important factor in growing a website. If you want to avoid the “fail whale” at right, you have to be able to scale your application to run on hundreds (and, if you’re really lucky, thousands) of servers. Let’s take a [...]
Wow – a big, fancy phrase that may seem intimidating at first. Let’s break it down: “Continuous” meaning constantly, all the time; and “Integration” – building smaller parts into a larger whole. “Constantly Building” ? Well, that’s pretty darn close. So, what are we constantly building here? Sure, we’re churning out new features regularly, but [...]
We’re using PivotalTracker as our agile planning tool. It’s great for maintaining a backlog of prioritized user stories and managing the flow of stories within an iteration. We’re really happy with it. But recently a new requirement came up: How can we manage our bigger features? How can we make sure all the stories we [...]
It’s been a while since we were using Thoughtworks Mingle as our agile project management tool. We liked their Kanban style Card Walls View a lot. Nevertheless, we switched to PivotalTracker because of its superior support of prioritizing stories in a backlog and automated iteration planning. Unfortunately, PivotalTracker does not offer any Kanban style card [...]
Zen is a brand new Kanban tool for lean project management. In contrast to PivotalTracker, which concentrates on automating iteration management for SCRUM like projects, Zen’s main view is a story board. The funny thing is, that I preferred the stroy board view in Mingle over the list view provided by PivotalTracker before I started [...]
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 [...]
My boss threw down the gauntlet Monday morning during our weekly meeting. In relaunching one of our decade old platforms, we couldn’t afford to get bashed by fickle finger of Google Search Results and I needed to take extra care in ensuring all redirects were properly made. With over twenty thousand pages, it was no [...]
