interesting full stack provisioning

attn: thiago & peter. skip first two vids but watch the third. good stuff.

peter mc has already started looking into this for us

good blog on CD

We should look at Jez's book on our Safari Books account too

the video for this is linked to in some of the other shares recently, but it is brilliant and should be viewed, so linking slides separately. do watch vid

like the idea of siphoning off flaky tests -- keeps them in one place to be properly addressed, and keeps the sanctity of the main non-flaky tests.

"the operations team provides infrastructure as a service to product teams, such as the ability to spin up production-like environments on demand for testing and release purposes, and manage them programmatically. "

particularly pertinent is the focus on fixing intermittent test failures.

If you've used similar software, then you might agree that managing these daemons is a hassle. If you're using BackgrounDRb, then the daemon must be running. Starting the daemon is not hard, but it is annoying. It's also possible that the system administrator forgets to start the daemon. While configuring the system to automatically start a daemon at startup is not hard, it is an extra thing to do, and thus a hassle. We thought, why can't such daemons be automatically started? Indeed, this won't be possible if the daemon is to be run on a remote machine. But in by far the majority of use cases, the daemon runs on the same host as the Rails application. If a Rails application - or indeed, any application - is configured to contact a daemon on the local host, then why not start the daemon automatically on demand?

There still seems to be confusion about the relative simplicity or difficulty of deploying a Rails app using JRuby. Many folks still look around for the old tools and the old ways (Mongrel, generally), assuming that "all that app server stuff" is too complicated. I figured I'd post a quick walkthrough to show how easy it actually is, along with links to everything to get you started.

enterprise ready rails deployment stack

preference pane for Passenger/mod rails on OS X