Writings on various topics (mostly technical) from Oliver Hookins and Angela Collins. We currently reside in Sydney after almost a decade in Berlin, have three kids, and have far too little time to really justify having a blog.
One of the things that is pushed here a lot is the necessity to make all new applications really production-ready before being deployed as a service. There is of course the adage "If it's not monitored, it doesn't exist" but beyond that there are a lot of other little fiddly details just to make something run. I'm talking about things like init scripts, logging etc.
It's very easy to get wrapped…
Last week I spent a bit of time scratching an itch I've had with doing maintenance. We use Nagios for our monitoring (without any addons, plugins or frontends) and scheduling downtime is a pain. Not only that, but deleting downtime is impossible short of screenscraping or (shock) actually clicking in the user interface. When I'm done doing maintenance I want to delete all the downtime (regardless…