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
Category: Tools & Technology
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
Selenium Testing in the Cloud with Sauce Labs
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: … Continue reading Selenium Testing in the Cloud with Sauce Labs
Resque: Email Notifications On Failed Jobs
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 … Continue reading Resque: Email Notifications On Failed Jobs
Update: LogicMonitor Internals
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. Installation and Operation A tarball called agent-linux.tar.gz is available for download … Continue reading Update: LogicMonitor Internals
Chef: RVM + Ruby Enterprise Edition as Default Ruby
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
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
Agile Web Operations 