DevOps

Our branch strategy based on Git Flow did not survive. It was getting a bit old in the tooth, but the final blow was automation.

Its name is Watney. Watney lives in Matrix. Watney is a bot I created about 6 months ago to start helping us with various tasks we need to do in our business.

Watney patiently waits for requests in a bunch of chat rooms we use for internal communications about each website we manage, each project we work on. Watney does a bunch of helpful things already, even though it is still really basic -- it fetches login links for us, helps us assemble release notes for each release we do to a production site, reminds us when it's time to do a release, and kicks off various automation jobs.

Here are the slides from my 2015 Drupal Summit talk, Quality Drupal DevOps!

You can also click here to open in a new window, full screen.

Faster, more secure, more maintainable. Three nice benefits we get from our new standard Drupal server architecture.

More and more I keep running into assertions that Git is a version control tool, and that if you use it for deployment, you're doing it wrong.

Why?

At Freelock we find it to be a very effective deployment tool, and I'm not seeing a solution that meets our needs any better.

Two presentations in particular caught my attention recently mentioned this:

Another sales call today, with a prospective start-upper who thought Drupal might lower his costs to get a web startup launched.

Lately at Freelock, we've been improving our Drupal site assessment.

In the software industry, the definition of "success" isn't necessarily the same as it is for the rest of the world. The customer asks for a complex system composed of many parts, with a specified budget, and a timeline. A software project is usually considered successful if any part of the system is developed, at any cost, at some time. Not necessarily the functionality requested, the budget, or the deadline.
So claimed Steve McConnell at a recent talk about the business value of software processes Timon and I attended.

Backups are the safety net and an absolute requirement. But the next most important part is doing what you can to stay out of trouble. We've all become accustomed to security updates on our computers. Today every operating system has an update system, and a huge number of attacks are on vulnerabilities that have fixes released but people have neglected to apply.

Cloud computing has been a buzzword for the past couple years, but what does that really mean, and why should you care?

Jedi mind tricks for getting your web site done

We see it all the time. Our clients hire us to get a web site put together. We build it, provide tools, training, and everything, and then it sits there on our development server, waiting for them to finish writing up those new pages they wanted to add. Weeks go by. Then months. And in a couple cases, years.