Dear Loyal Readers, High availability has many benefits. I feel that people focus on 9’s of uptime ( 99% or 99.999%), but the real benefit is in the ability to live update different parts of your website. This is as much of a bonus for uptime as it is for continuous deployment. The Chaos Monkey is now an […]
Dear Loyal Readers, Security, like safety, almost always makes your life harder. It is inefficient. Now, as I said before, I love Jenkins for scripting and organizing project operations and today I’d like to talk about a security feature that can help you have your cake and eat it too. The challenge for us is that […]
Dear Loyal Readers, Everyone uses Jenkins. It is like Pringles on any project; once you start using it, who doesn’t want a nice framework / web UI for scheduling and polling tasks!? My first use of Jenkins was a simple CI build where every job simply executed the classic Makefile: make make test make install But as […]
I’m presenting at Chef Con! So if you have any free time, you should drop by Santa Clara next week. Schedule Direct link to me I’m going to talk more in depth about migrating to the cloud using Chef, Design decisions which can save you some time, and talk to them about some debugging tips […]
As I talked about last month when trying to demystify “UNDEFINED METHOD `[]’ FOR NIL:NILCLASS” error, it can be challenging to make sure all your attributes are set the way you want, or even at all. One thing that should be detectable is anytime you get nothing (nil) back from a Node[] call, we might as […]
Typically you’ll get an error that looks like this: NoMethodError ————- undefined method `[]’ for nil:NilClass Cookbook Trace: ————— /cookbooks/test/recipes/default.rb:15:in `from_file’ Relevant File Content: ———————- /cookbooks/test/recipes/default.rb: 12: 13: puts “JPM Recipe start” 14: puts node[‘att1’] 15>> puts node[‘att2’][‘att3’] 16: What just happened? Well, this recipe just referenced a sub-attribute (‘att3’) of a […]
Dear Loyal Readers, The basic scenario for a VPC is a public facing subnet, and a private subnet only accessible via the first subnet (this is the web server w/ data backend scenario, aka Scenario 2). Unlike spawning an instance like I did in my previous post, the challenge to this script is that many […]
Dear Loyal Readers, I’ve been delving into automating AWS deployments and I’m a huge ruby fan for any sort of Linux admin, so I started with the AWS SDK and the samples/ec2/run_instance.rb. The example for deploying an instance was pretty straight forward; I just wanted write about some features/modifications that I found useful. Modification #0 — […]
