Redis Cloud Gets Easier with Fully Managed Hosting on Azure

ScaleGrid, a rapidly growing leader in the Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) space, has just launched their new fully managed Redis on Azure service. This Redis management solution allows startups up to enterprise-level organizations automate their Redis operations on Microsoft Azure dedicated cloud servers, alongside their other open source database deployments, including MongoDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Redis, the #1 key-value store and top 10 database in the world, has grown by over 300% in popularity over that past 5 years, per the DB-Engines knowledge base. The demand for Redis is skyrocketing across dozens of use cases, particularly for cache, queues, geospatial data, and high speed transactions. This simple database management system makes it very easy to store and retrieve pairs of keys and values, and is commonly paired with other database types to increase the speed and performance of an application. According to the 2019 Open Source Database Report, a majority of Redis deployments are used in conjunction with MySQL, and over half of Redis deployments are used with either PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch.

ScaleGrid’s Redis hosting service allows these organizations to automate all of their time-consuming management tasks, such as backups, upgrades, scaling, replication, sharding, monitoring, alerts, log rotations, and OS patching, so their DBAs, developers, and DevOps teams can focus on new product development and optimizing performance. Additionally, organizations can customize their Redis persistence and host through their own Azure account which allows them to leverage advanced cloud capabilities like Azure Virtual Networks (VNET), Security Groups, and Reserved Instances to reduce long-term hosting costs up to 60%. 

“Cloud reliability has never been so important,” says Dharshan Rangegowda, Founder and CEO of ScaleGrid. “It’s crucial for organizations to properly configure their Redis deployments for high availability and disaster recovery, as a couple minutes of downtime can be detrimental to a company’s security and reputation.”

ScaleGrid is the only Redis cloud service that allows you to customize your master-slave and cross-datacenter configurations for 100% uptime and availability across 30 different Azure regions. They also allow you to keep full Redis admin access and SSH access to your machines, and you can learn more about their advantages over competitors Compose for Redis, RedisGreen, Redis Labs and Elasticache for Redis on their Compare Redis Providers page.

AIDA: Badoo’s journey into Continuous Integration

It’s hardly news to anyone that product development and testing involve a lot of boring routine work, which can lead to human error. To avoid complications stemming from this, we use AIDA.

AIDA (Automated Interactive Deploy Assistant) is a utility that automatically performs many of the processes in Git, TeamCity and JIRA.

In this post, we focus on how through using AIDA we were able to automate multiple workflows and create a scheme of continuous integration.

We’ll start by looking at the version control system (VCS) we use here at Badoo, specifically how Git is used to automate creation of release branches, and their subsequent merging. Then we’ll discuss AIDA’s major contribution to both JIRA integration and TeamCity.

Git flow

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Cloud Deployment: It’s All About Cloud Automation

Many organizations are facing the challenge of migrating their IT to the cloud. But not many know how to actually approach this undertaking. In my previous post I took a hands-on example of SpringSource’s PetClinic reference application with a Tomcat web server front-end and a Cassandra NoSQL database backend and showed how to onboard it to the cloud in a manageable fashion. But many think this methodology is only good for modern applications that were built with some dynamic/cloud orientation in mind. For example, how different would the cloud on-boarding process be if I modify my PetClinic example to use a MySQL relational database instead of the modern Cassandra NoSQL clustered database? In this blog post I intend to show that cloud on-boarding of brownfield applications doesn’t have to be a huge monolithic migration project with high risk. Cloud on-boarding can take the pragmatic approach and can be performed in a gradual process that both mitigates the risk and enables you to enjoy the immediate benefits of automation and easier management of your application’s operational lifecycle even before moving to the cloud...

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Vagrant - Build and Deploy Virtualized Development Environments Using Ruby

One of the cool things we are seeing is more tools and tool chains for performing very high level operations quite simply. Vagrant is such a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments.

Web developers use virtual environments every day with their web applications. From EC2 and Rackspace Cloud to specialized solutions such as EngineYard and Heroku, virtualization is the tool of choice for easy deployment and infrastructure management. Vagrant aims to take those very same principles and put them to work in the heart of the application lifecycle. By providing easy to configure, lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual machines targeted at development environments, Vagrant helps maximize your productivity and flexibility.

If you've created a build and deployment system before Vagrant does a lot of the work for you:

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Product: FAI - Fully Automatic Installation

From their website: FAI is an automated installation tool to install or deploy Debian GNU/Linux and other distributions on a bunch of different hosts or a Cluster. It's more flexible than other tools like kickstart for Red Hat, autoyast and alice for SuSE or Jumpstart for SUN Solaris. FAI can also be used for configuration management of a running system. You can take one or more virgin PCs, turn on the power and after a few minutes Linux is installed, configured and running on all your machines, without any interaction necessary. FAI it's a scalable method for installing and updating all your computers unattended with little effort involved. It's a centralized management system for your Linux deployment. FAI's target group are system administrators who have to install Linux onto one or even hundreds of computers. It's not only a tool for doing a Cluster installation but a general purpose installation tool. It can be used for installing a Beowulf cluster, a rendering farm, a web server farm, or a linux laboratory or a classroom. Even installing a HPC cluster or a GRID and fabric management can be realized by FAI. Large-scale linux networks with different hardware and different installation requirements are easy to establish using FAI and its class concept. Remote OS installations, Linux rollout, mass unattended installation and automated server provisioning are other topics for FAI. The city of Munich is using the combination of GOsa and FAI for their Limux project. Features: * Boot methods: network boot (PXE), CD-ROM, USB stick, floppy disk * Installs Debian, Ubuntu, SuSe, CentOS, Mandriva, Solaris, ... * Centralized installation and configuration management * Installs XEN domains and Vserver

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FAI wiki

FAI the fully automated installation framework for linux from Debian Administration

Fully Automatic Installation (FAI) Video Interviewby http://www.perspektive89.com/

Rolling Out Unattended Debian Installations by Carla Schroder from LinuxPlanet

A talk on fai and debian

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Product: Capistrano - Automate Remote Tasks Via SSH

Update: Deployment with Capistrano  by Charles Max Wood.  Nice simple step-by-step for using Capistrano for deployment.

From their website:
Simply put, Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks on one or more remote servers. It executes commands in parallel on all targeted machines, and provides a mechanism for rolling back changes across multiple machines. It is ideal for anyone doing any kind of system administration, either professionally or incidentally.

* Great for automating tasks via SSH on remote servers, like software installation, application deployment, configuration management, ad hoc server monitoring, and more.
* Ideal for system administrators, whether professional or incidental.
* Easy to customize. Its configuration files use the Ruby programming language syntax, but you don't need to know Ruby to do most things with Capistrano.
* Easy to extend. Capistrano is written in the Ruby programming language, and may be extended easily by writing additional Ruby modules.

One of the original use cases for Capistrano was for deploying web applications. (This is still by far its most popular use case.) In order to make deploying these applications reliable, Capistrano needed to ensure that if something went wrong during the deployment, changes made to that point on the other servers could be rolled back, leaving each server in its original state.

If you ever need similar functionality in your own recipes, you can introduce a transaction:

task :deploy do
transaction do
update_code
symlink
end
end

task :update_code do
on_rollback { run "rm -rf #{release_path}" }
source.checkout(release_path)
end

task :symlink do
on_rollback { run "rm #{current_path}; ln -s #{previous_release} #{current_path}" }
run "rm #{current_path}; ln -s #{release_path} #{current_path}"
end

The first task, “deploy” wraps a transaction around its invocations of “update_code” and “symlink”. If an error happens within that transaction, the “on_rollback” handlers that have been declared are all executed, in reverse order.

This does mean that transactions aren’t magical. They don’t really automatically track and revert your changes. You need to do that yourself, and register on_rollback handlers appropriately, that take the necessary steps to undo the changes that the task has made. Still, even as lo-fi as Capistrano transactions are, they can be quite powerful when used properly.


From the Ruby on Rail manual:

Ultimately, Capistrano is a utility that can execute commands in parallel on multiple servers. It allows you to define tasks, which can include commands that are executed on the servers. You can also define roles for your servers, and then specify that certain tasks apply only to certain roles.

Capistrano is very configurable. The default configuration includes a set of basic tasks applicable to web deployment. (More on these tasks will be said later.)

Capistrano can do just about anything you can write shell script for. You just run those snippets of shell script on remote servers, possibly interacting with them based on their output. You can also upload files, and Capistrano includes some basic templating to allow you to dynamically create and deploy things like maintenance screens, configuration files, shell scripts, and more.

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Friends for Sale uses Capistrano for deployment.