The next step to get a better grip on your environment is figuring out exactly what kind of production configurations you have running out there. If you've ever caught yourself walking through the data center and wondering just what in the hell those servers in the back corner are for, this phase will be quite … Continue reading Visible Ops: Setting Up Your Configuration Management Database
Month: September 2008
Service Isolation By Virtualization
As recommended by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, I’ve divided all layers of our web application into separate virtual machines using Xen. At a first glance, having virtual machines for every service sounds like quite some overhead. Isn’t it much simpler to just install the whole stack on one box and let it run? Why take the hassle … Continue reading Service Isolation By Virtualization
Visible Ops : 4 Agile Steps to ITIL Compliance
Anybody in operations that wants to gain more control and understanding of their environment has heard of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). This set of concepts and techniques introduced by the UK's Office of Government Commerce in 1980s heavily borrows from the ideas outlined in IBM's "Yellow Books" by Edward A. Van Schaik (and later … Continue reading Visible Ops : 4 Agile Steps to ITIL Compliance
How to Inflate And Deflate Data in Ruby and PHP
I had to port the client part of a PHP based client-server program, which received some XML data along with compressed images as binary data. As it cost me some time to inflate the received data in Ruby, I want to share what I found out about deflating and inflating data in Ruby and PHP. … Continue reading How to Inflate And Deflate Data in Ruby and PHP
Kicking The Last of the Departmental Blues
Given proper coaching, teams must be empowered to decide and execute decisions on their own. This means that a team must have the proper make-up including designers and architects, application and database developers. Once a team commits to the story backlog, they must work together to ensure that all stories are delivered by the end … Continue reading Kicking The Last of the Departmental Blues
Puppet vs. Capistrano – a short comparison
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 … Continue reading Puppet vs. Capistrano – a short comparison
Successful Teams Are Small And Dedicated
From the dawn of time, humans have always worked together as a team to overcome hardship and danger, and make the community stronger. Specialization naturally grouped people together to form hunting parties or food gatherers and later on governing councils and religious groups. This grouping together of dedicated, like-minded people forms the core of our … Continue reading Successful Teams Are Small And Dedicated
Setup a Ruby on Rails Project Using the Lighthouse API With ActiveResource
As you might have already guessed, I'm constantly striving for the simplest yet most optimal process for running both an agile development team and agile web operations. People come first, then the procedures followed by the people and finally, the tools those people use. Since tools supporting the agile development process have the lowest priority … Continue reading Setup a Ruby on Rails Project Using the Lighthouse API With ActiveResource
