Consistency is the key to successful engineering teams. Here at Newmedia we are constantly seeking ways of providing tools to allow our engineers to be more efficient. The consistency is critical when understanding and managing the technical debt created by a team of intelligent people. One area we spend a fair amount of time focusing … Continued
A series of articles that cover how NEWMEDIA utilizes best practices to better secure and improve operational infrastructure. The DevOps movement is about enabling better collaboration between development and operational IT staff by automating operational processes. Done correctly, the implementation of DevOps methodologies enables increased productivity, allowing us to spend less time on the dreary … Continued
At NEWMEDIA, we pride ourselves on our ability to collaborate and work as a team. It is this mentality that has gotten us to where we are today and will lead us into the future as a successful company. During Drupalcon, the keynote on the first day talked about having a rock star on the … Continued
In the devops community the standard process is to allow other repos store what is theirs, and let your repo store what is yours. To do this we use scaffolders, builders, bundlers, package managers, etc. Drupal is not an exception, it is an example. Drush is the tool we use for Drupal and it allows … Continued
Drupal 8 opens the door for clean, readable, version-controlled configuration in Drupal development. But how can we leverage this system effectively in development teams? Configuration Management in Drupal 7, Our Process Our collaborative Drupal 7 development process typically starts with a site built by a team, entirely defined in code. We don’t do databases until … Continued
This week: 2014 DevOps Report and DrupalCon This week I have been attending DrupalCon. This is my first DrupalCon and I am impressed by the inclusiveness of the Drupal community and the prospect of the release of Drupal 8. I have been enjoying interacting with many of the people that I have meet. Since my … Continued
With a properly setup Chef repository and server, managing Drupal application deployments becomes a simple exercise of managing the subset of metadata within the combinations Chef role files that are specific to each deployment. Prerequisites This article will focus solely on the mechanics of how to deploy a Drupal site by creating and updating a … Continued
Securely deploying sensitive data with Chef can be achieved through the use of encrypted databags, which can be managed easily with a properly configured knife.rb file. If you’re using Chef as your configuration management solution, you are probably familiar with it’s powerful command line utility, knife, which allows one to interact with the chef server … Continued
When you want to test the integration of your snowflake data into your environments you should consider KitchenCI. You should understand Test Driven Development with RSpec and Chef to such a degree that you have exhausted it as a resource. In that post we created a set of acceptance criteria and tests that support a … Continued
Packer is a powerful tool that enables the creation of identical multi-platform virtual machine images from a definition file. In this article we will discuss how to create base virtual machines for testing and deployment with nmdpacker. One of the bigger challenges we face when working with team based infrastructure management is how to provide … Continued
