Ever taken a midnight drive down a dirt road without any headlights on? While it's certainly a thrilling (and stupid) thing to do, you shouldn't do it with your data center. But do you know what the load of your web servers were this morning? Could you tell me how many MySQL "slow queries" were … Continue reading Getting a Grip on your Operations with Munin
Category: Tools & Technology
Super-simple Ruby Subversion Command Line Wrapper
Like Dan did recently, I was setting up a Subversion repository one year ago. Of course, I also wanted to have regular backups of my Subversion repository. As I was tired of writing bash scripts for such a task, I looked into writing a simple Ruby script for backing up my Subversion repositories. Full and … Continue reading Super-simple Ruby Subversion Command Line Wrapper
Limiting Access to Test and Production Systems
How do you decide who in the company should have access to the test and production environments? Opening it up to everyone is one extreme which in today's security sensitive world is no longer an option. At the far other end, granting only one person access, while perhaps more secure (depending on who you've entrusted … Continue reading Limiting Access to Test and Production Systems
Leveraging Subversion Hooks for Fun and Profit
Last week, I showed you how to setup a secure subversion server. Today, I'd like to show you how to technically accomplish a couple of development themes that are near and dear to my heart. The first is creating a quality gate with a release branch and creating a team of committers who are the … Continue reading Leveraging Subversion Hooks for Fun and Profit
Setting Up A Secure Subversion Source Code Repository
Our source code repository is currently hosted at the offshore development site and there is no external access to it (neither through the Internet nor a VPN). While this is certainly desirable from a security standpoint, I'd really love to see what the developers are actually working on. I asked the director there to put … Continue reading Setting Up A Secure Subversion Source Code Repository
Pimp my Website: Downsizing your Web Pages
In the current economic downturn, everyone's keeping an extra close eye on the bottom line and looking for ways to save money. Let's compare the bytes of data on your network to water droplets and your website to a leaky faucet. You know you should take an afternoon and fix the damn thing, but something … Continue reading Pimp my Website: Downsizing your Web Pages
Pimp my Website: Streamlining Your Content
Hopefully, you have a better idea about how (un)performant and (un)optimized your website is after going through some of the tools I introduced you to last week. You've made the first step in getting to know more about how your site is really served to your users. Now, I'll start walking you through some of … Continue reading Pimp my Website: Streamlining Your Content
Website Performance Optimization
Since Steve Souders's published "High Performance Websites" back in September 2007, a lot of people finally sat up and took notice of front-end web performance optimization techniques. Over a year later, you'd hope that most folks had figured out the basics like compressing content, using expires headers and reducing requests. Unfortunately, it seems that multi-core … Continue reading Website Performance Optimization
Using Capistrano For Configuration Management
As I mentioned in my short comparison of Puppet vs. Capistrano, we're currently using Capistrano not only for deployment and live monitoring of our application, but also for configuration management. Using How-To Documents For Configuration Management Before getting started with Capistrano, I used to write very detailed how-to documents to make sure that I didn't … Continue reading Using Capistrano For Configuration Management
Service Isolation By Virtualization
As recommended by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, I’ve divided all layers of our web application into separate virtual machines using Xen. At a first glance, having virtual machines for every service sounds like quite some overhead. Isn’t it much simpler to just install the whole stack on one box and let it run? Why take the hassle … Continue reading Service Isolation By Virtualization
