It’s five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. There are no new bug reports and everything is looking smooth. Your plan of a relaxing weekend is in sight when you get a call—the website you look after isn’t responding. Yikes. AWS Lambda minimizes the chance of this truly terrifying event from happening by taking care of server maintenance while you focus on coding robust applications.
About a decade ago, the Ruby programming language made a big splash in the software engineering industry thanks to the Ruby on Rails web framework. The terse and friendly syntax of Ruby and the “they thought of everything” feeling of Rails offered web startups the ability to move quickly and nimbly.
It’s the night before a big deadline, and just before you press the button to deploy, you notice a small but important bug! You open a terminal, type in the command to run the code—and all you see is a page of errors. It’s these palm-sweating moments that make us wonder whether we made the correct career decision. Configuring our systems and keeping them working is a struggle most of us deal with regularly. Ruby Version Manager (RVM) attempts to solve this problem.
Ruby on Rails makes writing web applications a pleasure. It’s a powerful and intuitive platform, built on an equally powerful and intuitive language. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking the time to check your code for bottlenecks and performance problems before you ship. In this post, I’ll cover how to use Rack Mini Profiler to profile your Rails application.
Have you ever been confused about the different ways to handle missing data in the Ruby language? I know I have, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. The options Ruby offers come in the form of several methods: “present?”, “blank?”, “nil?”, and “empty?”. There are all somewhat related since all of them check for the absence of data in some way.
Authentication for web apps is a difficult problem. Anyone who’s ever tried to create their own authentication system will tell you that there are a lot of unexpected edge cases. What’s more, your authentication system is an externally-facing part of your application. This means if someone is trying to hack into your application, your login system’s security will be one of the first places they check.
AKS is the managed service from Azure for Kubernetes. When you create an AKS cluster, Azure creates and operates the Kubernetes control plane for you at no cost. The only thing you do as a user is to say how many worker nodes you’d like, plus other configurations we’ll see in this post. So, with that in mind, how can you improve the AKS cluster performance of a service in which Azure pretty much manages almost everything?
A Rails migration is a tool for changing an application’s database schema. Instead of managing SQL scripts, you define database changes in a domain-specific language (DSL). The code is database-independent, so you can easily move your app to a new platform. You can roll migrations back, and manage them alongside your application source code.
If you’re thinking about using containers to manage an application, there are a lot of options for technologies to use. It can be difficult to even know where to begin to make a decision. One common question is whether someone should use Docker vs Kubernetes for managing their application containers. This is a misleading question. In truth, Docker and Kubernetes aren’t competing technologies. There’s no need for them to face off.
Everybody climb aboard the hype train with me. Today, we’re going to study a new job title: the DevOps engineer. This role is getting popular in the same way that the full-stack developer role became popular before it. In fact, one could argue that the DevOps engineer is an extension of the full-stack developer in that both seek to extend our ownership of our software.
