This is going to be another short technical post. As I mentioned previously, I’ve been coming up to speed on a set of new technologies in preparation for a new job (more on this soon!). I started building a site in NextJS, and have since decided that: Normally, I would build a server in my […]
Category Archives: Operations
I was recently giving a friend some advice on how to set up a minimal stack for a starter project, and somewhere along the line realized that my MVP was approaching a dozen different AWS services. Time to stop and start reevaluating life decisions, people. So, I went back to the drawing board, and set up […]
At TripAdvisor, the devops team managed about 400 physical servers spread across three server rooms. We ordered and provisioned new hardware, scavenged parts (and sometimes whole servers) from the live site teams, replaced hard drives, installed and upgraded OSes, rebooted, rewired, and were generally on call for all manner of problems. What a pain. I mean, seriously, […]
It’s trite, but true – when I first started at HelloShopper (né Scratch), I was overwhelmed trying to come up to speed on a new company, new team, new commute, new set of technologies, new code base, new tools, new operational infrastructure, new risks, new, well… Everything. The existing team had put together a website […]
TripAdvisor has a fair amount of physical hardware, and one of the devops team’s responsibilities was to manage the hundreds of servers in the development environment. We provisioned new machines, retired old ones, replaced controller batteries, and constantly upgraded, added, and replaced hard drives. Working in an AWS stack means not having to deal with most of that any more (huzzah!), […]
Like peanut butter and chocolate, cut and tr are two great commands that go great together. cut provides an easy way to grab one or more fields from a line of text, and tr allows you to prepare the line first. Let’s start with cut. Consider the following directory listing: # ls -l total 5392 […]
I’m not a Linux guru. I’ve always known just enough to get the job done, but was never focused on getting deep into the command line for its own sake. Ever since joining the devops team at TripAdvisor almost two years ago, though, and more recently taking responsibility for operations at Scratch, I’ve had to learn a much broader array […]
As I mentioned in my last post, my startup has just shipped its first public release! It’s a good feeling to be iterating instead of writing from the ground up, and I thought it would be a good time to take a deep breath and reflect on where we’re at. Architecture Scratch is built using an entirely Javascript […]
One of the things about being in operations is that it introduces you to a whole host of concerns, features, and disciplines that you’d otherwise take completely for granted. In the same way that you rarely think about the work that goes into maintaining the sidewalk outside your house, or the massive international infrastructure devoted […]
I’ve been working in DevOps for just about exactly one year now. Different companies call their teams different things, but at TripAdvisor we divide Operations into the following buckets: TechOps: Live site hardware. This includes managing the data centers, racking and kickstarting servers, setting up firewalls, routers, load-balancers, networking, DNS, bandwidth, certs, and so on. SiteOps: […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 