John Allspaw and Paul Hammond did a great presentation at Velocity 2009 about the tools and culture at Flickr, which enable them to do 10+ deploys per day. My favorite quote is: Ops' job is NOT to keep the site stable and fast [but] Ops' job is it to enable the business (this is the … Continue reading Dev and Ops Cooperation
Author: Matthias Marschall
The opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company.
Aegis: Role-based Permissions for your Ruby on Rails application
This is a guest post by our friends over at makandra, a cool Ruby on Rails development shop. Today they announce a great new Ruby gem for dealing with role-based permissions. You know the game! Each time you start a new application the same procedure starts over again: You set up your tools like git, … Continue reading Aegis: Role-based Permissions for your Ruby on Rails application
Monitoring OpenSolaris Zones with Nagios
We're running separate zones for web, app, and db servers. To be able to know the health of our application and our servers, we rely on pnp4nagios for graphing performance data like CPU utilization, memory usage, etc. Using OpenSolaris zones, there is only one OS kernel running. This is different in e.g. XEN, where every … Continue reading Monitoring OpenSolaris Zones with Nagios
Behavior Driven Ops, Kanban vs. Scrum and a new upcoming Monitoring and Trending Tool
Testing Dash Metrics with Cucumber (Bradley Taylor) - A short article showing off a Cucumber feature for monitoring with Nagios. Kanban vs. Scrum (Henrik Kniberg) - A great, 26 page long PDF about the similarities and differences between Scrum and Kanban. Absolutely worth reading! Reconnoiter (Theo Schlossnagle) - Theo and his OmniTI Labs are working … Continue reading Behavior Driven Ops, Kanban vs. Scrum and a new upcoming Monitoring and Trending Tool
Setting up a test database on a ruby on rails continuous integration server using SQL instead of schema.rb
For developing our Ruby on Rails based web site, we usually take regular SQL dumps from our production servers (of course, anonymizing sensitive customer data along the way). Always having a fresh dump allows us to be on the safe side when writing database migrations. Having an up to date development database enables us to … Continue reading Setting up a test database on a ruby on rails continuous integration server using SQL instead of schema.rb
webrat: Automated Acceptance Testing with RSpec or Cucumber
Recently, I was looking deeper into how we could add some automated acceptance tests to our Ruby on Rails based website. We're using RSpec since quite a while now for TDD, but doing some high level acceptance tests was not on our agenda so far. DRY Cucumber Scenarios The new cool kid on the block … Continue reading webrat: Automated Acceptance Testing with RSpec or Cucumber
1st Birthday: Best of Agile Web Operations
It's time to say "Thank you" to all of you, our loyal readers. Thanks for reading, commenting and subscribing to our posts for exactly one year now. That's right, Agile Web Operations is now one year old. I can hardly put into words how great it is to have you with us! 103 posts and … Continue reading 1st Birthday: Best of Agile Web Operations
Seed Data In Ruby On Rails
To run automated tests for your Ruby on Rails webapp, not only do you need your latest database structure deployed to the test database (created by rake db:test:prepare), but you also need some seed data for lookup tables, e.g. like zip codes. Common approaches like adding seed data through rails migrations are discouraged, and plugins … Continue reading Seed Data In Ruby On Rails
Acceptance Testing with Cucumber
After watching a Pivotal Labs Tech Talk Making a Case for Cucumber, I decided to give it a try. Especially the seamless integration with rails and webrat made me curious. Webrat is a headless browser simulator, which can execute UI tests for you. You even can use the same syntax to drive a real browser … Continue reading Acceptance Testing with Cucumber
Agile on steroids
Agile software development is a great thing. It makes people deliver real value faster. Based on the agile manifesto there are a lot of processes and frameworks available (XP, SCRUM or Lean Software Development anyone?), which try to enable teams to develop better and more relevant software. So far, so good. In our company, we're … Continue reading Agile on steroids
