Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We recently removed webpacker from our Rails 5 application. While it was a great way to bootstrap a new Rails app with a significant amount of Javascript we encountered some serious performance problems that we felt really impacted our productivity. We build our application images after every git push and we’d like to be able to deploy them quickly.

When it comes to hosting applications, business and IT administrators often need to make tough decisions as to whether cloud hosting or retention of the software at their own data center is the preferred option. Public cloud hosting may have the edge in terms of scale and distribution, but there are certain instances where an onsite approach to application hosting is a better idea.

A recent survey from Capgemini revealed that while enterprise-scale automation is still in its infancy, IT automation projects are moving along (below). IT is starting to view automation less tactically, and more strategically.

Deploying a basic Serverless application has been made easy with the abundance of frameworks out there. If you’re part of a small team or working on a relatively simple project, setting up a basic serverless CICD process is also pretty straightforward, since there is plenty of information on the subject. But when a Serverless application grows it can get very complex very fast.

Have you ever been confused about the different ways to handle missing data in the Ruby language? I know I have, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. The options Ruby offers come in the form of several methods: “present?”, “blank?”, “nil?”, and “empty?”. There are all somewhat related since all of them check for the absence of data in some way.

In my last post, I talked about the evolution of infrastructure as code and its role in modern software development. To recap, let's take a quick look back at what an IaC process establishes: in a nutshell, IaC is a methodology that enables you to manage your servers and deploy your applications purely through code. Through some configuration language saved to a file, you define the resources and packages that servers need.

With Serverless, it’s not the technology that’s hard, it’s understanding the language of a new culture and operational model. Serverless architecture has coined some new terms and, more confusingly, re-used a few older terms with new meanings. This glossary will clarify some of them.

Today I’m excited to announce a new Rancher Labs project called Rio. Rio is a MicroPaaS that can be layered on any standard Kubernetes cluster. Consisting of a few Kubernetes custom resources and a CLI to enhance the user experience, users can easily deploy services to Kubernetes and automatically get continuous delivery, DNS, HTTPS, routing, monitoring, autoscaling, canary deployments, git-triggered builds, and much more.