solrevdev

Monday, September 02, 2013

Whip Up Awesome w/the Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook [feedly]

This is great book. Not quite finished it yet but it's the first tech book I've purchased in a long while so that says something.

I'm using it to help set up both development and production environments for a new stack and it's answered quite a few questions I've had about chef, vagrant and aws.

Recommended.

Shared via feedly // published on Opscode Blog // visit site

The Chef Community and its many awesome contributors keep doing amazing things. Case in point, our friend Matthias Marschall (a software engineer 'made in Germany' and CTO at gutefrage.net GmbH helping run Germany's biggest Q&A site) just published his new book "Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook".

Check out the synopsis:

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook has all the required recipes to configure, deploy, and scale your servers and applications, irrespective of whether you manage 5 servers, 5,000 servers, or 500,000 servers.

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook is a collection of easy-to-follow, step-by-step recipes showing you how to solve real-world automation challenges. Learn techniques from the pros and make sure you get your infrastructure automation project right the first time.

Available here, it's a dynamite Chef resource created by one of us in the Community. Chef has always been about a group of like-minded practitioners working together to help each other build better infrastructure and Matthias' new book keeps that tradition going strong.

Whether you're new to Chef or a long-time user, Matthias has something to teach all of us. All of us here at Opscode thank Matthias for the Herculean effort he put into this project and hope all of you in the Community benefit from what he's created.

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Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Achievement Unlocked - Opscode Learn Chef Tutorial Followed

Nothing too fancy here just some basic Ruby, Git, Vagrant and VirtualBox in order to follow some steps on the Opscode Learn Chef site.

Next steps are to really get stuck in getting some useful environment setup.

All this learning about Chef, Knife, Cookbooks and Recipes and I am now really hungry so time to put it down and I'll continue looking at this new shiny stuff tonight. Especially the Amazon Web Services bits.

Saturday, August 24, 2013

DevOps side project - chef v puppet + vagrant + aws

So my side project is going to be an abstraction over some DevOps tasks with some opinion and hopefully best practise baked in with web and mobile/tablet clients to centrally manage these tasks, a nice reporting layer with data from various providers for developers and non developers to use.

Ambitious I know but if it scratches my itch and helps me with my job then perhaps it will be useful for others.

I want to support more than just continuous delivery of .NET based apps to windows servers and to build on the knowledge I've gained so far and perhaps be less reliant on the tools that have helped me up to this point.

For example deploying a Java, MySQL and Solr stack or a Ruby, Sinatra and MongoDB stack all with infrastructure as code in mind.

Chef vs Puppet

My "to read and learn about" list has for some time included tools such as vagrant, chef and puppet, Chef and puppet do pretty much the same thing albeit in slightly different ways and are built on ruby and while not a language I've used in anger is nice to read and has plenty of resources available. Both tools have a good community and have cookbooks or sample configs for most things to get you started.

- source : https://www.scriptrock.com/blog/puppet-vs-chef-battle-wages/

There isn't much to choose between them apart from a general feeling that Chef is more developer focused, does most of the work on the end nodes (actual machines) and has a steeper learning curve and puppet is more sys admin based and does more on the server side.

Wether this is fair or not i do not know so being more developer by trade than sys admin i would normally download both and see which is the best fit by trying the same basic tasks in both tools but this could end up a yak shaving excercise and I want to move as quickly as I can.

Amazon Web Services

So I've decided to just bite the bullet get cracking and pick Chef purely because my cloud provider of choice is Amazon Web Services and they have chosen Chef for its OpsWorks product and has resources for its other offerings cloudformation and elestic beanstalk.

If Amazon are investing infrastructure and time to it then so will I.

Now with this decision made I re-read some of the documentation from Amazon and there are multiple solutions and API's that have come on leaps and bounds since I last looked and could really jump start my project. Everything from full control to a Heroku style system could be built however I do not want to build clones of Heroku or AppHarbor necessarily.

Vagrant

Now I haven't mentioned much about vagrant but from the reading I've done it's just a no-brainer to have in my toolset for testing configurations and it has plug ins for both chef and puppet. I will blog about this tool when I start using it in anger.

Summary and linkage

Some more reading and playing around needed but I want to get started as soon as possible and be as lean as I can be. Time to decide on a set of features for iteration 1.

Anyway here are some links that started me off and I'll try and update as I move forward.

OpsWorks:

http://www.opscode.com/blog/2013/02/20/aws-opsworks-uses-opscode-chef-as-default-automation-engine/

http://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/

Chef:

http://www.opscode.com/chef/

http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/aws

CloudFormation:

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/

https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-examples/IntegratingAWSCloudFormationWithOpscodeChef.pdf

Elastic Beanstalk:

http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/

Vagrant:

http://www.vagrantup.com/

Puppet:

http://docs.puppetlabs.com/

Friday, August 23, 2013

Wallet really empty now!

So now I'm all geared up for my multi-platform DevOps application. Apple and Xamarin licenses purchased. Web front end stack sorted sharing an API that I'll use for android and iOS applications.

Decided I couldn't afford a Mac license as well. maybe if the apps go from scratching my own itch to helping others I might dip my toe in the water.

Right here goes!

Creating Calca - A symbolic calculator with markdown for iOS and more [feedly]

Added to my "to listen to" list. covers all the boxes except DevOps for my interests right now.

Shared via feedly // published on Hanselminutes // visit site

Calca is a powerful symbolic calculator that gives you instant answers as you type. It was written by Frank Krueger (creator of iCircuit) using C# and Xamarin tools and is available today for iPhone, iPad, and Mac desktop - plus soon for Windows! How did Frank do it, and why?

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Octopus 2.0: Health checks will now check for free disk space [feedly]

More goodness from octopus deploy. a situation that has happened to me a few times on test amazon boxes where the default disk size settings were selected, not a huge problem as you can create an ami with a larger virtual disk and launch a new instance with that resizing the partition

But it's a 30 minute job by the time it's back up and deploy-able to. Always better to catch these first and do a planned upgrade rather than a failed deployment letting you know.

Shared via feedly // published on Octopus Deploy // visit site

Hard disks are cheap, but running out of free space is a common problem when it comes to managing application servers, especially virtual servers. Octopus isn't meant to replace Nagios or other health monitoring tools, but we do have a basic health check that we run every 30 minutes against your servers. A good suggestion came up on UserVoice: report free disk space in the health check.

This is the health check summary in Octopus 2.0:

Clicking through, you can see the details for all the fixed disks:

As I said, this feature isn't meant to replace your existing server monitoring tools, but if you don't already have something in place, hopefully it's useful. Happy deployments!

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Thursday, August 22, 2013

Wallet emptied!

But I'm now cleared for take off!

Achievement unlocked : iOS and Mac developer program joined

Well, the application has been submitted and paid for.

Next up an Xamarin Studio licence.

Writing code can be expensive on the Apple Eco system. lets hope this becomes a good investment!

Well it's the reason I bought the Mac in the first place so it's about time I get something in the App Store.

Hoping to use the same servicestack driven api that my bootstrap and ember.js web app will use and share some code. then perhaps write an android app.

Baby steps and a side project wrapping amazon web services for devops work.

The big change in Bootstrap 3 that no one’s talking about [feedly]

An article covering boostrap 3 and it's new mobile first design.

"Coming back to Bootstrap 3, what hasn't been discussed very much this week is that the new release has had a significant impact on rendering performance."

Shared via feedly // published on Encosia // visit site

As you probably already know if you've seen any tech news this week, Twitter Bootstrap 3 came out of RC and was officially released this past Monday. There are a plethora of changes in the new version, but the two most visible changes are a "mobile first" responsive grid and a new flat graphical style, ala Windows 8.

The flat styling has been especially controversial. If you didn't need to differentiate a site with distinctive design (e.g. internal admin sites), you could usually get away with using previous versions of Bootstrap without any stylistic modification, but not so much with Bootstrap 3.

Unfortunately for those uses, the default styling in Bootstrap 3 is fairly bland until you customize it a bit or augment it with a full theme. Bootswatch and WrapBootstrap are two great resources to accomplish the latter. To simply bring Bootstrap 3 most of the way back to Bootstrap 2.3.2′s look and feel, there's also an official theme you can apply.

So, I think the brouhaha over flat vs. gradient defaults is overblown. More importantly, that change has had an interesting side-effect that seems to have been mostly overlooked this week: Performance.

"Mobile first" means performance is crucial

In a "mobile first" world, Bootstrap's biggest weakness has always been performance. It's surprising if you haven't delved into the topic before, but the impact of structural choices in a CSS framework can have a tremendous impact on layout and rendering performance – particularly on under-powered mobile devices. Even between pages that look nearly identical, small differences can make or break achieving the all-important 60 FPS draw rate for scrolling and animation.

Adobe's relatively bare-bones Topcoat framework is a great example of just how much performance you can squeeze out of a mobile browser when that's your primary focus. They even have a running benchmark of each build's rendering and layout times as part of their CI workflow. Compared to less-optimized frameworks, the difference in jank is stark on slower devices and/or browsers.

Coming back to Bootstrap 3, what hasn't been discussed very much this week is that the new release has had a significant impact on rendering performance. To illustrate that, Paul Irish used Chrome's dev tools to took a look at the performance difference between Bootstrap 2.3.2 and Bootstrap 3 RC1 a few weeks ago:

Pretty impressive.

In Bootstrap 3′s case, it's likely that the improvement stems almost entirely from the flat styling, as gradients and shadows are expensive to render. Regardless of the root cause, Bootstrap 3 is much more viable for sites that need to work well on under-powered mobile and tablet devices.

You've been reading The big change in Bootstrap 3 that no one's talking about, originally posted at Encosia. I hope you enjoyed it, and thanks for reading.

If you've got any feedback, please click through and leave a comment; I'd love to hear from you. You can click here to jump directly to the comment section of this post.

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How to Be a Highly Productive Night Owl [feedly]

Yep I am definitely a night owl and not an early riser. An article here on Lifehacker on how to be more productive if you fall into this category.

Shared via feedly // published on Lifehacker // visit site

How to Be a Highly Productive Night Owl

Being an early riser has its benefits, but it isn't for everyone. Some of humanity's greatest minds (Voltaire for example) were renowned for sleeping in. Depending on personality, environment, and work schedule, being an early riser may not be practical.