The Ancestry “Magnetic Containment Field” meets Docker

Posted by Ancestry Team on August 19, 2015 in Agile, Development, DevOps, Distributed Computing

In the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the magnetic containment field prevents contact of antimatter with normal matter in a warp core. If the field were to collapse or fall below 15% of its maximum integrity, the starship would be destroyed. This containment field was a very important safety system for starships (reference Wikia). Read More

Building an Operationally Successful Component – Part 3: Robustness

Posted by Ancestry Team on July 23, 2014 in DevOps, Uncategorized

Building an Operationally Successful Component – Part 3: Robustness My previous two posts discussed building components that are “operationally successful.”  To me, a component cannot be considered successful unless it actually operates as expected when released into the wild.  Something that, “works on my machine,” cannot be considered a success unless it also works on Read More

Making Chef Dynamic

Posted by Daniel Sands on January 2, 2014 in Continuous Delivery, DevOps

We’ve been working with Chef (formerly OpsCode) for a couple years now. I can safely say that I’ve spent more time crawling through forums and reviewing code documentation than I care to admit. In all that time, I’ve never seen anyone clearly document how to use Chef dynamically. I hope that I can share some Read More

Agile Development Leads to a Happier Company

Posted by Ancestry Team on December 27, 2013 in Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Technology Conferences

Over the past few years Ancestry.com, has undergone a significant transformation within many aspects of its business. Steady growth combined with Agile adoption, continuous delivery, and improvements in technology and infrastructure, has created an organization focused on delivering value. In November, Ancestry.com CEO, Tim Sullivan presented at DevOps conference, FlowCon about the organizations shift to Read More

Featured Article: Migration to Continuous Delivery at Ancestry.com

Posted by Ancestry Team on December 7, 2013 in Agile, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Technical Management, Testing

Starting with the adoption of Agile development practices, Ancestry.com has progressed to a continuous delivery model to enable code release whenever the business requires it. Transitioning from large, weekly or bi-weekly software rollouts to smaller, incremental updates has allowed Ancestry.com to increase responsiveness and deliver new features to customers more quickly. Ancestry.com has come a Read More

DevOps: A Disruptive Innovation?

Posted by Ancestry Team on October 14, 2013 in DevOps

One of the most frequent questions I get when speaking at conferences or with other industry folks is, “How do I get DevOps going at my company?” Always a great question, but not always easy to answer. Obviously, there are a lot of factors and issues to consider.  So a lot of the time I Read More