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. Building Your Infrastructure With Plain Capistrano Initially we've built our … Continue reading Configuration Management remixed: Introducing Carpet
Month: January 2009
Agile is not Ad hoc
Last week I made an honest mistake that caused severe downtime on our website. Of course, I spent a lot of time thinking about all the contributing factors which ultimately caused such a nexus in the space-time continuum to appear over my keyboard at that crucial moment when I hit the enter key. It didn't … Continue reading Agile is not Ad hoc
Puppet or Capistrano – Use the Right Tool for the Job
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 … Continue reading Puppet or Capistrano – Use the Right Tool for the Job
Getting a Grip on your Operations with Munin
Ever taken a midnight drive down a dirt road without any headlights on? While it's certainly a thrilling (and stupid) thing to do, you shouldn't do it with your data center. But do you know what the load of your web servers were this morning? Could you tell me how many MySQL "slow queries" were … Continue reading Getting a Grip on your Operations with Munin
Super-simple Ruby Subversion Command Line Wrapper
Like Dan did recently, I was setting up a Subversion repository one year ago. Of course, I also wanted to have regular backups of my Subversion repository. As I was tired of writing bash scripts for such a task, I looked into writing a simple Ruby script for backing up my Subversion repositories. Full and … Continue reading Super-simple Ruby Subversion Command Line Wrapper
Limiting Access to Test and Production Systems
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 … Continue reading Limiting Access to Test and Production Systems
Thoughtworks Mingle vs. Pivotal Labs Tracker
As I've shown in my plea to Agile Tool Vendors: Please simplify my life, I currently see only Pivotal Tracker to be a tool which simplifies my life instead of managing complexity. Enterprise Class vs Opinionated Software Maybe the biggest differences between Mingle and Tracker are their core assumptions and target audience. While Mingle is … Continue reading Thoughtworks Mingle vs. Pivotal Labs Tracker
Leveraging Subversion Hooks for Fun and Profit
Last week, I showed you how to setup a secure subversion server. Today, I'd like to show you how to technically accomplish a couple of development themes that are near and dear to my heart. The first is creating a quality gate with a release branch and creating a team of committers who are the … Continue reading Leveraging Subversion Hooks for Fun and Profit
