Author: Matthias Marschall

The opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company.

Three Proven Ways To Enable a DevOps Culture

~ Matthias Marschall ~ 4 Comments

To deliver customer value rapidly, it's important that developers and operations work together closely. There are certain traits of organizations which make it either harder or simpler for both to collaborate. In this post, I want to show you three examples which make DevOps simpler. Shared Infrastructure Awareness is one of the key factors to … Continue reading Three Proven Ways To Enable a DevOps Culture

PivotalTracker: The Simple Steps To Start a New Project

~ Matthias Marschall ~ 2 Comments

PivotalTracker is a great tool for organizing your work. No matter whether you work mainly in software development, operations, or in a shared DevOps environment, PivotalTracker keeps you up to the task. Over the last couple of years using it, we've seen some patterns for setting up projects and organizing stories with tags. Start And … Continue reading PivotalTracker: The Simple Steps To Start a New Project

Chef: RVM + Ruby Enterprise Edition as Default Ruby

~ Matthias Marschall ~ 15 Comments

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 … Continue reading Chef: RVM + Ruby Enterprise Edition as Default Ruby

How to Deploy Ruby on Rails With The Opscode Chef Application Cookbook

~ Matthias Marschall ~ 2 Comments

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 … Continue reading How to Deploy Ruby on Rails With The Opscode Chef Application Cookbook

The Irresistable Pull To Self Organization

~ Matthias Marschall ~ 2 Comments

Every organization has to deal with a mix of ongoing and project oriented work. But, even if you structure your teams into departments to optimize ongoing work, they keep trying to self organize into project focused teams. Matrix Management vs Project Organization There are the regular tasks and chores, and there are the bigger undertakings … Continue reading The Irresistable Pull To Self Organization

Far Future Expires Headers For Ruby On Rails With Nginx

~ Matthias Marschall ~ 2 Comments

Browsers load static images from your website again and again if your web server does not send an expires header with a date far in the future. To avoid that unnecessary traffic on your servers and unnecessary load times for your users, it's a good idea to let your nginx send those expires headers. But, … Continue reading Far Future Expires Headers For Ruby On Rails With Nginx

Getting Started With The Opscode Chef Platform – Configuration Management In The Cloud

~ Matthias Marschall ~ 1 Comment

In "The Moving Parts of Opscode Chef" there was an interesting discussion about the need of a highly available chef server if you want to use opscode chef as your configuration management tool of choice. Especially for small to medium sized enviroments running your own chef server is overkill. If you don't want to use … Continue reading Getting Started With The Opscode Chef Platform – Configuration Management In The Cloud