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Write your own Slack chatbot in Golang
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Knife EC2: Manage Amazon EC2 Instances With Chef
Chef enables you to automate your infrastructure. It provides a command line tool called knife to help you manage your configurations. Using the knife EC2 plugin you can manage your Amazon EC2 instances with Chef. knife EC2 makes it possible to create and bootstrap Amazon EC2 instances in just one line – if you go through a few setup steps. In this article, I want to show you how to setup your Chef installation and AWS configuration so that you can easily bootstrap new Amazon EC2 instances with Chef’s knife.
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Supporting Millions of Pretty URL Rewrites in Nginx with Lua and Redis
About a year ago, I was tasked with greatly expanding our url rewrite capabilities. Our file based, nginx rewrites were becoming a performance bottleneck and we needed to make an architectural leap that would take us to the next level of SEO wizardry.
In comparison to the total number of product categories in our database, Stylight supports a handful of “pretty URLs” – those understandable by a human being. With http://www.stylight.com/Sandals/Women/ you have a good idea what’s going to be on that page.
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Test Driven Chef Cookbooks With Meez
When cooking a new dish, things get out of control if you try to manage too many things at once
You might face a similar situation when trying to write a new Chef cookbook.
Getting your arms around all those tools and frameworks needed to write solid, tested cookbooks gets you spinning. You need to install Food Critic, Chef Spec, Berkshelf – and the list goes on. This set up can easily take up to half a day or more.
French Chefs arrange all the ingredients which they’ll need well before they start cooking. They call this set up procedure „Mise en place“, or in short „Meez“.
And you should do the same
That’s what Meez is all about. It’s a Ruby Gem which creates a cookbook for you which has puts all these tools in place before you start cooking. Now you can work like a professional Chef concentrating on the recipe at hand instead of juggling new tools.
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How to set up wordpress on ec2 using puppet and git
Having started out on a Joyent appliance, migrating to Linode, and, finally, to Amazon with a Bitnami stack, we noticed the common pain of manually configuring each of these environments. Bitnami caused us an even bigger headache by being very difficult to update (apt-get doesn’t update the bitnami wrapped AMP stack). We decided to get full control of our box by setting up a stock Debian LAMP stack on AWS using Puppet and git to manage our sites. Here’s a gentle introduction on how we did it.
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Lifecycle of a Click – Improving Web Page Speed
This is a guest post by Brian Doll, Application Performance Engineer at New Relic
Six seconds can be an excruciatingly long time to wait for a single web page to load. Why does it take so long? Let’s take a look at each step of the timeline and see how we can make it faster.
Page load timeline.
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Free Cloudkick Monitoring for EC2
For my final post in freely acquiring, maintaining and monitoring a virtual root server, I’d like to introduce you to Cloudkick. They’ve had a major marketing campaign going on after being acquired by the folks from Rackspace. I actually clicked through one of their ads while browsing some headlines on Slashdot.
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Poor Man’s Automated Snapshots for EC2
We’ve invested quite some time in our WordPress Micro instance now. It’s definitely past the playing-around, prototype phase, so let’s get some automated backups in place. But, since we already suffered to get the EC2 API Tools installed, the hard part is actually done. Let’s get a couple of weekly cronjobs setup:
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WordPress Caching For High Performance EC2 Micro Instances
For the price, it’s hard to beat the EC2 Micro instance. But, if you have even a little bit of traffic, don’t expect to run a stock AMI without feeling some performance pain. After migrating this blog, we noticed that being logged in (meaning no wordpress cache hits) literally slowed the server down to a crawl. Just clicking around wp-admin a few times would drive load up to 12-13 and stuck the virtual server in 98%st. Apache connections were tweaked, mysql database settings optimized – traffic was really light (2-3 users) and the damn thing was unreachable! It was time for some PHP acceleration…
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The Hidden Costs of Technical Debt
Recently, I had the unpleasant responsibility of stopping our development line. And it wasn’t just for a day or two. It was for a couple of months. The complexity of the codebase made every simple feature we added take weeks to implement, and I realized we were getting a negative return on our efforts. How the hell did things get this bad?
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