I’ve been using Ansible more and more. It is a really great way to manage server configuration. As I’ve transitioned away from Chef, I’ve been working on establishing some patterns that seem to work well when setting up servers for deploying web applications.
Just over 2 years ago I relaunched and moved to Ghost. At the time, my reasoning was simple:
The other day I quit working with one of my Chef repositories for some servers I manage. I quit in rage. I quit because nothing worked how I wanted it to.
There is a common pattern I’ve seen, in guides about Ruby on Rails deployment via Capistrano, to setup a maintenance pages or a maintenance mode. The guides help you configure nginx such that the existence of the maintenance page causes the nginx proxy to return the maintenance page instead of forwarding on to the unicorn/puma/passenger server.
It is easy to create a hugely complex disaster recovery plan with all kinds of redundancy and failover. It is also easy to spend a ton of money doing so. There are cases however, where a daily snapshot, and the ability to boot up that most recent snapshot, is plenty of protection.
Testing. I love it. It is crucial to good software development. Running those tests continually and providing quick feedback to developers is important. At work, we use Jenkins to provide our continuous integration.