DevOps

Moving to a microservices architecture often raises the question: What is the best environment to stabilize services? Here’s how and why you should use Kubernetes, Docker, and CircleCI to containerize and deploy apps.

Do you run deployment scripts from your development machine, or find yourself referring to deployments by the day of the week they were deployed, instead of using version numbers? It’s time for a better solution. In this article, Freelance Ruby Engineer and automation enthusiast Amin Shah Gilani walks you through his perfect deployment pipeline to use at the beginning of your project. With this CI/CD configuration, every push is tested, the master branch is deployed to staging servers with a fresh database dump from the production server, and versioned tags are deployed to production with backups and migrations running automatically.

Software delivery has come a long way. And, somewhere between the transition from physical media to software containers, we have changed the way we try to manage them. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Jonathan Bethune explores how software containers have motivated us to treat servers as more dispensable, and the risks and rewards involved.

Docker itself has been around for years and is composed of many inter-operating pieces. One of them is Docker Swarm, which allows you to declare your applications as stacks of services and let Docker handle the rest. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Leah Sapan explains how to use Docker Swarm to deploy your own self-managing stack, followed by a quick example.

In the rapidly evolving Internet world, getting things done fast is always critical. Still, developers today waste hundreds of hours on tasks not related to programming: setting up databases or caches, deploying projects, monitoring online statistics, and so on. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Minhao Zhang guides us in a step-by-step tutorial on how to reduce waste by setting up your first virtual machine using Amazon Web Services, and introduces the most widely used AWS services that can boost your productivity in minutes.

Small teams frequently have to compete with bigger, more structured organizations who are capable of allocating more resources to project management, and software release management in particular. This means that small teams, or even individual developers, need to properly organize and execute their release process in order to keep up. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Lucas Mancini focuses specifically on small startups, teams that don't have, or can’t afford, DevOps support, or teams that don't have a formal process defined for releasing new versions of their product. The author provides a suggested checklist method to manage releases, tailored to match his past experience working on different projects, together with some recommended best practices and guidelines.

The Art of War is an ancient military treatise, but despite its age, the text is still included in the syllabus at many military schools. Sun Tzu’s principles and teachings also have practical applications in politics, business, sports, and, believe it or not, software development. In fact, you might just be applying some of these principles in your daily routine, without even knowing. In this post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Jose F. Maldonado explains why many of these ancient teachings still matter, and what you can do to make them work for you and your team.

Using modern DevOps Tools like Chef, Docker, Ansible, Packer, Troposphere, Consul, Jenkins, SonarQube, AWS, etc., does not mean that you are applying DevOps principles. DevOps is a way of thinking.

NGINX, a sophisticated web server, offers high performance load balancing features, among many other capabilities. Like most other web server software for Unix-based systems, NGINX can be configured easily by writing simple text files. However, there is something interesting about tools that configure other tools, and it may be even easier to configure an NGINX load balancer if there was a tool for it. In this article, Toptal engineer Mahmud Ridwan demonstrates how easy it is to build a simple tool with a web-based GUI capable of configuring NGINX as a load balancer.