trying to pick version control, continuous integration, and host for Flex + Ruby or Django smallish project. Question:
version control: I've used SVN and CVS in the past. I hear great things about git. Not sure what to pick.
continuous integration: I've heard good things about hudson and cruiseControl. Not sure what to pick
hosting: is my own server the only way to go? Are the decent cloud options that are not too expensive? or should I look for some free hosting service?
thank you for your help!
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Use Git.
Git is a great tool that allows a very flexible workflow. It has lots of benefits over subversion/cvs, the biggest of which is the ability to branch and merge seamlessly. This can't be overstated. The merge-hell that ensues when attempting to use svn's branching and merging is a thing of the past. For a better case on why to use git, check out http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/
Use Hudson.
Hudson is the easily the best CI tool in the game. The reason Hudson is the best is that its easy to configure (for one or multiple nodes), it has a ton of plugins, and handles the 90% use case extremely well. You are in the 90% use case. People like Mozilla aren't. Check out C. Titus Brown's talk at Pycon for more info. http://pycon.blip.tv/file/3259794/ (If you decide that Hudson isn't what you should use, check out buildbot)
Use Webfaction (or Rackspace Cloud).
Webfaction is a great starter ground. If your needs are low, check them out. Beyond that, I'd suggest taking a hard look at Rackspace Cloud (RSC). RSC makes scaling out much easier and their pricing model is very palatable for things that aren't bandwidth intensive (ie: most things that don't require tons of uploads/downloads). It starts at $10/mo. Their management console is good (save the DNS administration interface, but even that is more than bearable). If your needs expand beyond RSC (doubtful), you would do well to check out Amazon's EC2. Companies like RightScale can help when it comes to scaling out.
Related
I have created a django app that contains c++ for some of the views as well as a java library. How would I deploy this app? What kind of hosting service allows for multiple languages? I have looked at EC2, GAE, and several platforms (like heroku) but I can't seem to find a definitive solution.
I have never deployed anything to the web so a simple explanation would be much appreciated.
PaaS stuff is probably not your best bet. If you want the scalability and associated buzzwords(muh 99.9999999999% availability because my servers are hosted in a parallel dimension without electrical storms, power outages, hurricanes, earthquakes, or nuclear holocausts) that comes with hosting your application on a huge web company's platform, check out IaaS(Infrastructure as a service) systems like Google's Compute Engine or AWS. With these you just get a virtual server (or servers), running your Linux distro of choice, and you can install and run whatever you please on them without being constrained to a specific platform like App Engine or Heroku(where you have to basically write your app to specifically run on that platform). If you plan on consuming a ton of bandwidth/resources from the get-go, you will almost certainly get a better deal using a dedicated server(s) from a small company.
Interested in what specifically you are executing C++ for in a Django view. Image/video processing?
Well. Deployment is not really something where a simple explanation helps much.
First I would check what the requirements to the operating system are (compilers, dependencies,…). That will maybe reduce the options quickly.
I guess that with a setup containing C++ & Java artifacts, the usual PaaS (GaE, Heroku,…) offerings will not be sufficient because they define the stack. And a mixture of Python/C++/Java is rather uncommon I'd say.
Choosing an IaaS offering (EC2, …) may be an option. There you can run your whole self-defined stack and have the possibility of easier scaling.
Hosting the application on your own server(s) is also always possible. Check your data protection regulations to find out if it's not even a requirement.
There are a lot of ways to get the Django application to run. The Django documentation has some information about deployment. If you have certain special requirements, uwsgi may be a good application server.
You may also want a web server in front of the application. Possibilities range from using uwsgi's built-in http server or using e.g. Nginx with uwsgi.
All in all every component of the whole "deployment" has hundereds of bells and whistels and it's not easy to give advice without knowing specific requirements and properties of the system itself. You'll also probably need a database you have to deploy.
But before deploying it to the web, it's also important to have a solid build process to assemble all the parts. And not only on the development machine. With three languages involved this should be the first step solve. If it easily and automagically deploys in a development environment, moving it to a server is easier.
We have a (AJAX heavy) web application hosted in cloud across servers and we need to monitor the availability of this service. Requires logging in to the application with a username-password, perform some searches as that user etc.
Since we plan to use Nagios for some other monitoring tasks, we decided to use Nagios for web application monitoring too.
I came across three such solutions:
Webinject: I don't feel like using this. Project not under active development. It was last released in Jan 2006. I can't see any support/help available. Also I suspect how will it behave with Ajax.
Cucumber-Nagios:
I tried using this. It involves many Ruby components and found that you have to have in-depth knowledge of Ruby platform to make all these components work together. I am not a Ruby guy and having tough time making all these components work together. Also even this project is not under active development and I don't see support/help options available. I posted a bug 4 days back and don't see any response yet.
Selenium plugin for Nagios: Haven't tried it yet. Will try now.
Any more solutions available?
Also, since I don't see any good actively developed solutions for monitoring web applications using Nagios, I suspect if it's really a good approach to use Nagios for this? If not, what alternatives do I have? In short what is the best approach to monitor web applications availability?
Edit 1: We can't afford the Nagios XI paid version and will prefer open source solutions.
If not, what alternatives do I have?
Although Nagios was one of options that we've considered, we've chosen OpenNMS for monitoring purposes. Rationale for our decision is that OpenNMS is highly reliable and configurable free open-source tool and additionally, most of our applications are Java-based; OpenNMS offers integration with JMX. However, bear in mind that if you're demanding very complex tests for your Web site maybe it's better to look elsewhere. OpenNMS can be set to check for HTTP status codes etc., but if you're looking for complex scenarios take a look at:
Apache JMeter (we're using it mainly during the testing phase)
Selenium (can be well used even in production phase)
I'm not the only one with this question, but haven't found a lot of information in my research so far, so help me out.
We are a small IT crowd in an organization. We're looking to build a small, private service that would emulate a heroku/gae workflow. The basics of this: deploy an app as a git repository, and have it scale in a 'cloud' environment. Basically, a platform as a service (Paas).
Pretend we are amateur PM's, programmers, and sysadmins tasked with this. What would you recommend? We know generally what is needed: some sort of routing, database, caching, authentication, etc. What other tools do we need?
We would prefer tools along a ruby/python/haskell/erlang dimension, on a linux/bsd stack, with postgres databases(couchdb or cassandra in the future). We are not touching anything in the ms/.net area, nothing on the JVM (We've looked at Steamcannon, but no; Scala and Clojure tools are not entirely out of the question). We have a basic grasp of bootstrapping a cloud (e.g. Eucalyptus) to build on. We have an understanding of the basics in server admin, and the physical infrastructure limitations aren't a factor right now.
We're not looking into why gaerokuyardspace is the best choice, a list of such services, why we should ditch our plans for one of these services, or an argument against this plan. For this situation the decision has been made that the cost to build privately is more attractive than the cost of deploying elsewhere. We already know why and how for these services. We're looking to emulate and build upon these for private needs.
A short list of tools to be expanded:
Beehive
Steamcannon
Gitosis/Gitolite
?
Basically, I'd like to generate a list of tools for building heroku/gae like service on a small, private, definitely experimental/toy level.
I don't know that it will meet all of your stated needs today, but you should take a look at Cloud Foundry from VMware. You can check the FAQ for the commercial project or look in to the Open Source version that you can host and manage yourself.
Some combination of Cloud Foundry (above) gitolite, and fabric
will probably do well for you. Any such solution will take some time to get right.
(Disclaimer: I'm a lead developer on the AppScale project)
AppScale is pretty much right up your alley, especially if you're looking to run Google App Engine apps in your own private cloud. It's open source, so grab it and extend it if there are other types of apps you want to support (and definitely commit it back to us if you do).
I've been looking at Rietveld as a solution for the lack of code reviews at my company. Can it be set up on a server in-house without using App Engine? It seems to have a bit of App Engine specific code, and I'm not sure it could be set up on a plain old Django/Apache install. I've looked around, but haven't found any information about this.
Check out http://django-gae2django.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/examples/rietveld/README
The gae2django project lets GAE apps run against django instead of the GAE development environment.
That means you can run rietveld under django directly, using (by default) an SQLite backend. You can also use mysql or any other DB backend django supports.
That, plus a web server (e.g. Apache) with WSGI integration, makes a local rietveld install run nicely.
What about using one of these projects that provide the same backend services as GAE?
Typhoon AE
Appscale
There may be more, these are just the ones I know about off the top of my head.
A bit of App Engine specific code? It's supposed to be an example App Engine app, so yeah it's pretty well tied to it. But, you're right, it does use Django which could make it somewhat more feasible to port. I'll second #cope360 recommendation, but from the sounds of your question, it doesn't sound like you've done much with App Engine. If it's only used by a few people, try running it on the GAE SDK itself.
Beyond that, I'd think you could take most of the code in the "codereview" directory and build you're own Django/apache app from that.
Rather than fussing around with a port or other GAE emulation, I would consider using ReviewBoard.
Review Board is a powerful web-based
code review tool that offers
developers an easy way to handle code
reviews. It scales well from small
projects to large companies and offers
a variety of tools to take much of the
stress and time out of the code review
process.
For too long, code reviews have been
too much of a chore. This is largely
due to the lack of quality tools
available, leaving developers to
resort to e-mail and bug tracker-based
solutions.
We've seen a lot of time and energy
wasted doing code reviews both in open
source projects and at companies. In
both cases, code reviews were
typically done over e-mail. A
significant amount of time was spent
in forming review requests, switching
between the diff and the e-mail, and
trying to understand what parts of the
code the reviewer was referring to.
So in an effort to keep our sanity and
improve the process both in our open
source projects and at companies, we
wrote Review Board. We hope it will be
useful to your team too so you can
focus on what's important: writing
great products.
I have my first app, not that big, but it is the first step. (next big one on the way)
Now if I want to put it on my own Linode VPS, I have to configure mod_python or mod_wsgi, as well as memcache, Ngix, mySQL or Postgresql, etc. to make it work. If I put it GAE, All I have to do is convert the models to use GAE's API.
What I like about GAE is scaling. (if they can really do it)
Then I'd only worry about developing my apps and doing SEO work on them instead of worrying about load share/balance, cache, db / IO redundancy, etc.
I don't want to do any porting later on. (I have to decide now and stick with it)
So, if you have any experience on this, what do you recommend:
1- Use VPS(s) for everthing
2- Use VPS(s) plus Amazon S3
3- Use VPS(s) plus Amazon S3 & SimpleDB
4- Use GAE
Also: Would I be able to get away with not having JOIN rights when using the BigTable?
Note: I don't have any spatial need now, but for a location table I might need that later on.
I'd like to know what do you think!
There's business risk and technical risk.
Business risk is that you might have to move hosts later for some external reason. VPS's, EC2, etc require more upfront investment, but keep you independent. Tools like Chef can help with the configuration effort.
Technical risk is that your application may not be easily implemented on the platform. Since most VPS options allow you to install arbitrary software, they minimize this, again at the cost of more configuration effort on your part. AFAIK, the largest constraint GAE enforces on you is it's difficult to do long running background tasks. (Working without JOINs and other aspects of de-normalized data requires a different way of thinking, but this approach is fairly common in web applications no matter where they run once the SQL database is larger than a single host can support.)
If you can live with both these risks, GAE would appear to save you a substantial amount of effort. If you cannot live with these risks, you should tailor your own environment.
As an aside, I find S3 to be worth it no matter your environment. It's far simpler than ensuring your local server static file storage is reliably backed up, and you never have to worry about capacity. It's best if you use it for data that is uploaded but rarely overwritten or deleted (think facebook photo albums).
I don't want to do any porting later on. (I have to decide now and stick with it)
If that's the case, wouldn't you prefer to control deployment from the outset? It could be a great pain to port back from GAE later down the line if you hit its limits (whether they be technological limits or simply business decisions by Google that run counter to your plans for the future of your app).
Also configuring mod_wsgi, installing postgres etc. isn't particularly difficult, and you don't have to worry about things like load balancing and db redundancy for a while yet.
If it were me, I'd prefer the long-term certainty of a traditional server over the quick win of GAE. It all depends on your vision for the app, however.
I may be biased, but if you can live with GAE's limitations it really saves you a lot of work and worry about system administration issues (and to some extent scaling) -- plus, it's free as long as your resource consumption is low (basically meaning your traffic is low).
Can you do without joins? I don't know, as I don't know your app -- I'm a SQL fanatic, myself, yet for simple enough needs I haven't found it too hard to adapt. As I see it, the main limitation of non-relational DBs is that they're nowhere as nice as relational ones for "ad hoc" queries... you typically have to write a lot of procedural code instead of a nice SELECT or two:-(. But, that's more of a "data mining later" issue than one connected with serving your web app -- probably best solved by regularly bulk-downloading data from the web app's online storage to a "data warehouse" kind of setup, anyway, even if such storage was relational in the first place;-).
Before deciding, it might be worth a quick prototype adaptation of your app to GAE. You might run into stoppers that force the decision. Possible stopper issues include
Your schema doesn't make the transition to BigTable
You're depending on some C-based library that GAE doesn't support
You have a few long-running requests that exceed the thresholds that GAE imposes
The answer depends on the complexity and nature of your model layer, really. If it's complex or tightly bound to the rest of your code, porting is likely to be a significant effort. If it's fairly straightforward, or easy to tear out and replace, I would say go for it.
These days, I mostly write new code for GAE, but the fact that I can simply deploy with a single command has really lowered the barrier I feel towards writing cool new apps. Not having to worry about deployment and hosting is quite liberating.
All I have to do is convert the models to use GAE's API.
I am sorry, you are totally mistaken.
You also need to rewrite all the views code that uses the ORM. There are no joins. So you have to deal with and write a lot of procedural code instead of the nifty SQL that provides U whatever you want.
Querying is slow. You need to override save method of each model to store additional information of that model which may take a lot of time to compute when need. You also need to work on memcache to make the queries fast enough.
And then, Guido has said Django 1.1 is going to be included in a future version of Appengine. I am hoping they will have an out of the box generic ORM to BigTable mapper.
That said, if your app is simple without many joins needed, you could use the appengine patch project to use the current version of django on Appengine. Here is how.