Articles on Ops
How to Deploy Elixir Releases with Ansible
In my last post, I described how to generate a platform-specific Elixir release. Now, the only thing left to do is to put it on the world wide web. To follow along with this post, you’ll need a few things: An IP address for a remote machine (preferably running Linux) you want to deploy your …
Services and Serverless – Carbon Five LA Talk Night August 17th
The micro-services push is on with developers writing simpler applications that interact with each other. But how do you deploy these services? Manage versions and discoverability? Learn two approaches from our August 17th Talk Night speakers as they cover using Docker or going completely server-less with Amazon Web Services’ Lambda! First we’ll have Samuel Chow, …
Docker, Rails, & Docker Compose together in your development workflow
We’ve been trialing the usage of Docker and Docker Compose (previously known as fig) on a Rails project here at Carbon Five. In the past, my personal experience with Docker had been that the promise of portable containerized apps was within reach, but the tooling and development workflow were still awkward – commands were complex, …
Node.js in Production
When running a node application in production, you need to keep stability, performance, security, and maintainability in mind. Outlined here is what I think are the best practices for putting node.js into production. By the end of this guide, this setup will include 3 servers: a load balancer (lb) and 2 app servers (app1 and …
RethinkDB: a Qualitative Review
At Carbon Five we install and use many different database engines. Document-oriented databases are proving to be a good fit for more and more of our projects. MongoDB is the most popular of these and provides a powerful set of tools to store and query data, but it’s been plagued by performance problems when used …
Using HAProxy with Socket.io and SSL
Donning my ops hat a bit over the last few months, I have learned a bit about HAProxy, Node.js, and Socket.io. I was pretty surprised by how little definitive information there was on what I was trying to do for one of our projects, and HAProxy can be pretty intimidating the first time around. What …
Automating Node.js deployment to EC2 with Chef
This post is a follow up to my colleague Ben’s excellent post from three weeks ago describing how he got node.js up and running on Amazon EC2. He asked me if I could automate his deploy in order to help him provision his production environment. I decided it was a good opportunity to learn Chef.
Deploying node.js on Amazon EC2
After nearly a month of beating my head against the wall that is hosted node.js stacks — with their fake beta invites and non-existent support — I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands. Amazon Web Service (AWS) offers 12 months of a micro instance for free (as in beer) with …
Think Globally, Stage Locally
Or: how to create and deploy to a staging environment running locally! Staging: an environment that duplicates production as closely as possible to find any lingering bugs before you update production. Most of the Rails community develops on OSX but deploys to Linux; this can be fragile since it is common to forget Linux-specific environment …