Tools & Technology

Cloudfront Caching for Performance

by Dan Ackerson on February 1, 2011 · 0 comments

After making the legwork to get your static resources running on S3, it’s really just a matter of throwing a few digital switches to get them into Amazon’s Cloudfront CDN. And why would you want to do this? Simple answer – performance. Amazon’s CDN has enough strategically located datacenters throughout the world to reach your audience with the least amount of lag and fewest hops.

But, there are some definite caveats with such heavy caching of your web application’s resources. Namely, how to flush these caches – or should you go the “resource.name.build_id” route? And what about SSL requests? Read on to see how I solved these challenges.
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Moving Static Resources to S3

by Dan Ackerson on January 27, 2011 · 3 comments

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 stumbled upon along the way.

Did you know that the first release notes for S3 date back to March of 2006? It’s pretty safe to say that Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is a very mature service. S3 – just uttering those 2 characters alone bring up visions of fluffy cloud coolness and limitless storage arrays. But is it a real business advantage? Half a year later, I’m completely convinced.
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Migrate Your WordPress Blog to a Bitnami EC2 Instance

by Dan Ackerson on January 20, 2011 · 42 comments

The cool thing about technical howtos like this is the ability to share with other folks who get just as excited. Looking to save costs on our blog hosting, Amazon’s announcement of a 12 month free usage tier put us in the short list for migration. As Matthias did the bulk of the joyent public cloud & linode migrations, it was high-time I got my hands dirty. Without further ado, here’s how I migrated AWO to our first Amazon EC2 instance. Let’s get our geek on!
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Selenium Testing in the Cloud with Sauce Labs

by Dan Ackerson on October 19, 2010 · 1 comment

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:
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Resque: Email Notifications On Failed Jobs

by Matthias Marschall on September 28, 2010 · 2 comments

racatumba

I’m currently using Github’s resque, a Redis backed Ruby library for creating and running asynchronous and scheduled jobs. As we’re running business critical jobs with the resque scheduler plugin, I really want to know via email if a job fails. In this post I want to share my solution for making resque send emails on failed jobs
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Update: LogicMonitor Internals

by Dan Ackerson on September 21, 2010 · 2 comments

Derrick Coetzee

After using LogicMonitor for almost two months now I’ve become quite comfortable with it’s interface and very secure with it’s monitoring. I’ve been asked by a few folks for some of the more technical details on it’s operation which I’ll share with you here.
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Chef: RVM + Ruby Enterprise Edition as Default Ruby

by Matthias Marschall on September 7, 2010 · 15 comments

Seattle Municipal Archives

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 by REE. As this really bothered me, I created a little cookbook which installs Ruby Enterprise Edition as the default Ruby using Ruby Version Manager (RVM) and Chef. This gives me the best of both worlds: REEs stability and speed as well as a sane way of managing gems.
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How to Deploy Ruby on Rails With The Opscode Chef Application Cookbook

by Matthias Marschall on August 25, 2010 · 2 comments

Galileo55

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 them. His chef cookbooks really help you to configure your systems neatly. One of his cookbooks is the Application cookbook. It enables data driven application deployment. Currently, it supports Ruby on Rails apps. The preferred stack is currently Matz Ruby with Unicorn, but, in a later post, I’ll show you how to use it cleanly with Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE).
Let’s get started!
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LogicMonitor: My Virtual SysAdmin

by Dan Ackerson on August 3, 2010 · 4 comments

I’d recently ordered a new round of servers and was positively dreading having to setup Nagios & Munin on them. This is where the fact that I’m a “born & raised” developer really shines through. The configuration of Nagios is simply beyond me. No matter how much documentation I read, I just can’t get all the pieces moving right. Try to bolt Munin on top of this and I simply walk away in frustration. There had to be a better way…
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