Sunday, September 25, 2011

DevOps in Milliseconds

Another post about DevOps at AppNexus. Read it, love it, share it.

http://techblog.appnexus.com/2011/devops-in-milliseconds/

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Metrics at AppNexus

I wrote a blog entry for AppNexus about our usage of Graphite for our metrics system. Read it a million times, and I just might win an iPad.

http://techblog.appnexus.com/2011/metrics/

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Vagrant for repeatable development environments

"Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments."


I stumbled upon Vagrant last night while looking at buildbot and Jenkins.


Vagrant leverages Sun's Oracle's VirtualBox as well as Opscode's Chef or Puppet Lab's Puppet to give you the ability to easily create and provision Virtual Machines.


I ran through their Getting Started with Vagrant documentation, and everything worked beautifully. I'm looking forward to poking at it some more.


I think that Vagrant gives developers and ops two huge advantages:


1) Getting a new environment up and running for onboarding new developers is now a snap.


2) By deploying a development environment in the same way as other (sand, staging, prod) environments are deployed, you minimize (or eliminate) differences between environments, and therefore keep the wall between development and ops obliterated. No "oh, but it works in my dev environment" finger-pointing allowed!