I'm a huge fan of GitHub actions and organization level secrets, but you can't see what the current secret is w/i GitHub (w/o deploying a container somewhere with it exported as an ENV var). I tried to keep a copy in my former secret management tool clipperz.is/app but drift is real. It was always too … Continue reading Managing Github Secrets with Vault
Tag: continuous integration
If Devs Own Testing, Ops Owns the Environment
The devs are all writing automated tests and some are even experimenting with TDD. Congrats! But what happens when the build server breaks? Who's taking care that Continuous Integration is running smoothly? Seems to be an awful lot of red in there... Unlike writing the first basic tests, CI is hard. Did the test fail … Continue reading If Devs Own Testing, Ops Owns the Environment
Leadership In the Online Age: A Reflection On Team-Building
In the last decade of my career, I've been extremely fortunate to have worked with some of the best people I've ever known. A big contributing factor to this is the tech-savvy, expatriate culture that exists here in Munich as well as the type of people you typically find abroad who have left their home … Continue reading Leadership In the Online Age: A Reflection On Team-Building
Prerequisites for Continuous Deployment
Although we've skirted around the edges of Continuous Deployment on this blog, we haven't really gone into any details. The main reason for this is simply that neither Matthias nor myself have ever continuously deployed to our production environments. How hard could it be? Well, like with most engineering endeavors, it's about 99% preparation and … Continue reading Prerequisites for Continuous Deployment
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
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
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
Back to the roots: Bridging the Deployment Gap
Matthias and I started this blog over a year ago because we had first-hand experiences with the rift between developers and sysadmins. We knew this was a lose-lose situation not only for those directly involved, but the companies they were working for as well. We've described many real-life examples of how to overcome this rift, … Continue reading Back to the roots: Bridging the Deployment Gap
Dev and Ops Cooperation
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
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
Agile Web Operations 