I've always seen it as a battle. Maybe it's the soldier in me or just the willingness to fight for my beliefs. Either way, we are winning and the IT industry will never be the same. Developers and Sysadmins are joining forces and forming "Delivery Teams" - working together to ship high quality products to … Continue reading DevOps Entrenched – Tide Begins to Turn
Author: Dan Ackerson
Stealthily Introducing Agile from the Bottom Up
Even today, in the 21st century, it's rare for CEOs to steer their companies into agile waters. Change is hard, scary and leads into the unknown and changing an entire organization compounds all these fears. But, there are subtle, yet significant, ways in which you can organize your own work to be much more agile. … Continue reading Stealthily Introducing Agile from the Bottom Up
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: bitnami@awo:~$ crontab -l … Continue reading Poor Man’s Automated Snapshots for EC2
The Big-Bang Release Strikes Back
This is how I started off my New Year - merging the completely refactored code branch into the master. Test coverage was pitiful enough that there was no way we could do a release without a full regression test. Another term near and dear to my heart. I believe full regression testing was actually invented … Continue reading The Big-Bang Release Strikes Back
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 … Continue reading WordPress Caching For High Performance EC2 Micro Instances
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 … Continue reading The Hidden Costs of Technical Debt
Cloudfront Caching for Performance
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 … Continue reading Cloudfront Caching for Performance
Moving Static Resources to S3
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 … Continue reading Moving Static Resources to S3
Migrate Your WordPress Blog to a Bitnami EC2 Instance
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 … Continue reading Migrate Your WordPress Blog to a Bitnami EC2 Instance
What DevOps Means for Enterprises
This is a guest post by Jez Humble (@jezhumble) The DevOps movement only came to my attention in the final year of writing my book, Continuous Delivery. The book, based on experiences that are described by Chris Read in his earlier guest post in this series, describes principles and practices that are necessary for repeatable, … Continue reading What DevOps Means for Enterprises
