Green / Blue - Blue / Green

:P WAT? Green/Blue?

Blue/Green Deployment in Datacenter

How it Works

In the "blue-green" model, two identical application stacks are maintained (for convenience, I will refer to our application server instances and service instances as a stack, database deployments are done separately . One of the stacks is always live, let us say green is live and blue is stand-by.

When we want to deploy a new build to production, we deploy it on blue stack and do thorough testing. Once new build seems to work fine, the blue stack goes live and green becomes standby. This helps us do a quick rollback if issues are identified during deployment or sanity check.

What are the challenges?

The tricky bit here is to switch between blue and green stacks with almost no downtime.
An overhead here is to maintain two stacks and hence adds to the cost.

https://medium.com/devops-learnings/blue-green-deployments-in-data-center-e704f93f9f70

My new job requires a lot of automation set in place for us in DevOps to be able to manage the huge deployment-workloads we get. I am currently in the process of automating our setup to a degree where we only have to initiate deployment-processes without having to monitor them as they execute :P at least compared to before I came in

AUTOMATE ALL THE THINGS!

Googles 12-års jubileum

Google har nå indeksert og servert søketjenester på nettet i 12 år!

Jeg både gratulerer og hedrer IT-giganten ;) de har på sine 12 år levert et tallvis med tjenester / produkter som f.eks.: Google Documents, GMail, Google Android, Google Analytics, osv. som fremdeles brukes den dag i dag :)

Har selv vært en flittig bruker av diverse tjenester siden tidlig 2000. og søkemotoren siden dens tidlige dager (anno 1997). Denne bloggen serveres f.eks. via "blogger.com", og min personlige webside (http://www.pizslacker.org) driftes og kjører statistikk med Google-verktøy/-tjenester.

Gratulerer så mye med dagen! Og lykke til videre! ;D

Google-link:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/orkut/thread?tid=1162c40cce2c99ec&hl=en

Facebook for Android™

Hei hvor det går! ;D Da var native Facebook applikasjon på plass for Google Android også :P testing viser at denne offisielle appen er MYE mer stabil enn både "Babbler Lite" (som jeg har brukt) og andre tredjeparts applikasjoner.

Funksjoner inkluderer:

• opplasting av bilder
• posting på vegg
• sending av melding
• "Live Facebook Folder" *
• status widget

* Live Facebook Folder - er en dynamisk mappe som du kan legge på skrivebordet i Android og bruke til å hente epost-adressene og tlf-numrene til dine Facebook-kontaker.

Alt-i-alt en veldig intuitiv pakke :) men alt kan forbedres, og de har opprettet en egen gruppe på FB hvor en kan sende inn "Feature Requests" til utviklerne.

Cisco Turns Routers Into Linux Application Servers

I've always had a good eye to Cisco's networking equipment, due to the fact that they are administered through a CLI (Command Line Interface), i.e.: POSIX-style ;^)

Now they're integrating a GPL'ed Linux environment on certain so-called "AXP" switches/routers to allow for hosted applications developed with the accompanying standardized SDK and API (which includes standard support for C, Java and Python).

From http://www.internetnews.com/:

"From a GPL perspective, we've taken all the things that are GPL and reciprocated the code back to the community," Conover said. "Obviously if a developer built an application on top of a GPL platform, that doesn't imply that they have to GPL that code. "

The GPL is a reciprocal license that requires any modification made be contributed back to the community.

Overall, Cisco expects the AXP to reduce the hardware footprint at branch offices and provide deeper network integration that provides IT managers with more control over what they can monitor.

I suppose they realized the potential for hosted applications on network equipment after releasing the WRT54** series of routers through their sister company "Linksys". These routers offer the possibility to flash the firmware, allowing home-brewed firmware/software to be deployed. I have a WRT54GL router @ home, running "DD-WRT" with a few cross-compiled custom apps for network monitoring. And I must say, it gives me monitoring capabilities I never could have imagined a few years ago ;)

Securing PHP

I already have a machine with SSL/TLS-ready Apache running, now I need to be able to secure PHP, my favourite scripting language ;)

This useful little tutorial uses chroot and mod_security to achieve this.

http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1706

I'm testing this in combination with PHP scripting, to make my web-2.0 applications more secure, and when I'm satisfied with my setup of secured backends, I'll start using PHP in combination with Javascript and AJAX to make my apps more dynamic with regards to user-input and interaction. My whole point of this personal adventure is to maybe develop a content-management system that is a little more resistant to cross-site scripting and SQL-injections.

This is made possible by holding the apache-server and the PHP-backend in a chroot-jail, additionally secured by using mod_security as a web-firewall and not allowing HTTP headers with direct script execution and SQL manipulation.

As web-security gets more and more focus, I'm inspired to do my part in contributing to safer and more worry-free web environments. I'm not a programming guru, nor am I a security expert, but I understand the principles and concepts, so I just want to do my part as best as I can ;)