AWS CloudFormation vs Terraform

2015-10-03

I am a firm believer in the benefits of programmable and repeatable infrastructure for organizations of all sizes. There are a wide range of tools that are available to help you along this path but I just want to touch on two of them today: CloudFormation and Terraform. …

Troubleshooting AWS Elastic Beanstalk Errors

2015-05-02

When errors occur in your Elastic Beanstalk environment, the root cause may not always be obvious. In the browser, you may get a 502 Bad Gateway error or an error like: An unhandled lowlevel error occured. The application logs may have details. Not very helpful. …

Dockerized Postgresql Development Environment

2015-03-24

My local development environment is kind of a mess. I am running OSX and use a variety of techniques to run the projects I work on. For example, I have local postgresql, redis, and memcache servers running to support some projects. Every once in a while I run into issues where a version of the service I am running for one project is not compatible with the version I need on another project. This problem can be solved with virtualized, per-project development environments using a tool like Vagrant. …

Securing a Server with Ansible

2015-02-27

A while back, Bryan Kennedy wrote a post describing how he spends the first 5 minutes configuring and securing a new linux server. He runs through the list of commands and configuration settings that address things like: …

How to Convince your Boss to Invest in Continuous Delivery

2015-01-19

If you are a developer, you might already be aware of the benefits of continuous delivery. This can be frustrating if your management is not also on board. They might not see it as a worthy investment at this point. Maybe they feel your team is too busy fighting fires. Or there are important features to ship and taking time to develop a continuous delivery workflow would take away from that. Perhaps they have decided that an infrequent deploy schedule is best for your application. …

Enable Gzip Compression on Apache Shared Hosting

2014-12-27

I was working on tuning the performance of a site that happened to be hosted on a shared hosting provider - Dreamhost in this case. One of the simplest things you can do to improve performance is enable Gzip compression for HTTP requests. This is supported in all modern browsers and provides a quick win by reducing the size of HTTP responses and, therefore, improving response times. The instructions on how to enable this will vary based on your web server and the level of control you have. …

Ensuring a Command Module Task is Repeatable with Ansible

2014-11-22

A few readers have pointed out to me that there is a small improvement I could make to the simple Ansible playbook I created for my Ansible Quick Start post. Idempotence is an important concept in Ansible and the last task in the playbook was violating that principle. …

CloudFront with an S3 Origin

2014-11-10

In a previous post, I covered how to setup CloudFront as an asset host for a Rails application using the same site as the origin. It is also possible to use an S3 bucket as the origin. The easiest way I know of to make this work with Rails is to use the asset_sync gem. …

Web Fonts with CloudFront

2014-11-09

In my last post, I may have been a little cavalier when I said it is a “no-brainer” to use CloudFront to serve assets for your Rails application. In truth, there are a few issues that can make things more complicated. One of those is the ability to serve web fonts. …

Using CloudFront to Speed up your Rails Application

2014-11-06

Update: November 9, 2014. A few people asked me how to handle serving web fonts using CloudFront. I created a new post here that covers a few options. Moving your static assets (images, css, javascripts, etc.) to a Content Delivery Network is a quick, easy, and impactful win for the performance of your Rails application. CDNs are designed to distribute your content to multiple geographic locations and to serve it up to your users in the most optimal way possible. Using a CDN also lets you reduce the number of requests your web servers need to handle. This is especially important when you are hosted on platform like Heroku. …