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
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
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
I recently attended DevOps Days in Santa Clara, a two-day conference/event focused on the DevOps culture and practices. Even though the conference is in its fourth year, you still get talks about what DevOps is and what it means. The term “DevOps” is relatively new movement in the software development industry. Patrick Debois, a sysadmin/developer, Read More
Every once in a while when building NAnt targets you will come across the desire to create a <fileset> which is defined at runtime. Maybe you’d like to define the <fileset> as a property in a previous target or a calling target and have it be used in a subsequent task. For example we have a Read More
Over the past few years, Ancestry.com has been moving toward agile development methods. In fact, that’s the main reason I joined the company three years ago. Since starting at the company, I have worked at moving Ancestry.com into agile methods, including teaching Scrum. Over the years, agile has taken root in the company and the Read More
For the last year and a half, we’ve been breaking in a new concept at Ancestry.com called a DevOps engineer. There is a ton of material on the internet about what DevOps means to various groups, and how they’ve implemented it. A lot of it revolves around SCRUM, Agile processes, and other approaches to increase Read More
We have been working hard at Ancestry to build automated server health monitoring into our service infrastructure. One of the most recent efforts was the addition of some simple health tests that our load balancers could run by themselves to check on the health of our servers. We added three types of tests for each Read More