5 Essential Continuous Intergation Tools

A lot has been said about continuous integration. Here is our 5c. If you are just going to try it out or seriously researching going CI, you might want some points on tools you will need. So we compiled an article for you with shortlist of the most useful tools for continuous integration.

Jenkins

Everyone knows Jenkins. It is a hardcore, open-source continuous integration server. Mostly it is used for Java projects development. But Jenkins can also work with some .NET version control systems what makes it well-suited for .Net projects as well. With Jenkins you will enjoy a robust developer community, easy installation and more than 400 plugins for high customization.

TeamCity

This Java-based continuous integration server allows you to develop for .Net and mobile platforms. It runs locally and has a system tray notification tool which will alert you over email if any issues happen while the build is finishing.

Also, TeamCity has a built-in support for a project hierarchy. It allows you to build a project tree that will inherit settings and permissions.

Codeship

Codeship supports the most popular languages: Java, Ruby, PHP, Python. It integrates with multiple repository hosting services such as GitHub, Bitbucket, Deploy Anywhere, Engine Yard. Codeship significantly eases deployment. You just need to define a project in a UI and setting couple of parameters before making a commit. Codeship will test new code once it’s pushed and deploy it automatically.

Travis CI

This tool was built to test projects hosted on GitHub. Travis CI has pretty easy and straightforward setup. It requires only a.yaml configuration file to be created in the root of the desired repository. You can develop in C, C++, JavaScript, PHP, Perl and Python, all are supported.

Heili

Heili is an AI infrastructure monitoring and management solution. Think of it as a sidekick that helps out a true devops superhero. It automatically discovers your stack in the cloud, deploys monitoring and gives you peace of mind. Heili uses Ansible for provisioning so you get tons of automation out of the box and can add your own in just few clicks. Running a stack on AWS, Google or Softlayer was never easier.

And which tools do you use? Share with us in comments!

Provided by:Forthscale systems, cloud experts

ProfitBricks Has Released a New Data Center Management Tool

ProfitBricks, our partner, has released DCD R2 - unique and cloud computing industry-leading data center management tool.

Over the years ProfitBricks' teams have continued to push the envelope in performance, keeping the lowest prices in the indusrty. They wanted to create a better public cloud platform because the future of cloud needed it.

As a result ProfitBricks has enhanced the user experience to provide the most effortless cloud computing design and management tool the industry have ever seen.

What's New with the Data Center Designer R2?

DCD R2, a complete rewrite of game-changing visual infrastructure management tool, enables even easier design and management of data centers in the cloud. It is included with every account so you are able to test it out.

A new visual drag-and-drop interface lets businesses completely re-imagine the data center. DCD R2 is very intuitive as a data center management tool so even non-technical employees will be able to use it. This tool helps to free organisations from the limited and inflexible choices provided by first generation cloud computing industry incumbents. 

ProfitBricks provides a better and "unbound" cloud experience that delivers on the true promise of cloud computing.

Watch video below to learn how easy designing, configuring and managin the cloud can be with ProfitBricks' new data center management tool. Also, you can see it for yourself with a free live demo or by signing up for a free 14-days trial.

Provided by:Forthscale systems, cloud experts

How to select cloud provider.

So we choose the cloud provider for the project. What I would
recommend and for whom:

1. For a project that starts from scratch with a single server. Where
the project will be some time in development, and the load will
increase gradually. I recommend Digital Ocean. 30 GB SSD drive and 1GB
RAM is cheap, fast and enough to deploy the project. Very simple and
intuitive interface make it easy to go to the schema with an service
per instance when load increases. Simple clone the original droplet
and leave just one or part service on new droplet. The main advantages
in this case lowest price and easy of deployment.

2. If you plan to transfer to the cloud the complex, high loaded
project from multiple servers, you should pay attention to Amazon.
Greater flexibility, a large selection of OS images. Allow easier and
faster to transfer existing services. A wide range of additional
services to reduce the cost and simplify the operation of the project
as compared to the "bare metal" solution. Among the many services
Amazon you will find easy replacement of each of the components of
your project.

3. If you start from scratch to develop highly loaded
service(application). If you need a flexible multi-functional
environment. With the ability to deploy services in one click. You can
pay attention to the GCE. In this case, the ability to deploy virtual
machines rather secondary. Compared with possibility for developers
and resources provided by Google App Engine. It is extremely
inexpensive to operate a solution "application as service". The
project can be built in such a way that each user will pay for itself
the resources used.

Please note it's my own (DevOps) view of question. Each case requires
a individual approach. If you have any questions you can connect to our team of cloud experts. We provide:

• Cloud Consulting
• DevOps services
• Fully Managed Infrastructure
• Cloud inventorying
• Monitoring & Crash Prevention

Author: Ilya Shevyrev
Provided by:Forthscale systems, cloud experts

Creating a RAID device on Amazon AWS Elastic

Following procedure is for creating a software (OS managed) RAID disk devices.
EBS (Amazon web services elastic block storage) does not provide any RAID abilities by itself.
But you can use Linux SW raid option to increase either speed or device redundancy.
This tutorial will show you how.

First install RAID management tool on target EC2 instances

For Debian based (Debian, Ubuntu) execute: 
apt-get install mdadm
For Red Hat based (RHEL, Oracle linux, CentOS) execute:
yum install mdadm
For Gentoo execute:
emerge mdadm

Now prepare the EBS devices.

Create desired EBS volume
Attach new EBS volumes to EC2 instance and write down the device name (for example xvdf and xvdg)

Now you can create the RAID device from them.

Set up RAID 0 on this EBS instance with the following command:
  mdadm --create --verbose --auto=yes /dev/md0 --chunk=256 --level=0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/xvdf /dev/xvdg
   blockdev --setra 65536 /dev/md0

Now verify that the raid device /dev/md0 exists
cat /proc/mdstat

Next step is to add devices to the mdadm.conf file (main sw raid configuration file)
   echo DEVICE /dev/xvdf /dev/xvdg | sudo tee /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
 
Add the other device info about /dev/md0 to the mdadm.conf file so that it comes back on reboot
   mdadm --detail --scan | sudo tee -a /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

Filesystem

One RAID is set up , you can create a file-system on it, we usually propose XFS, but you can use any file system (ext3/4, zfs or reiserfs)
  
To create XFS file system, you will need to install support for it first.
For Debian based (Debian, Ubuntu) execute: 
apt-get install xfsprogs
For Red Hat based (RHEL, CentOS) execute:
yum install xfsprogs
For Oracle Linux:
Log in to ULN, and subscribe your system to the ol6_x86_64_latest channel.
Then run:
yum install xfsprogs xfsdump 
For Gentoo execute:
emerge xfsprogs 

Once installed, execute
mkfs.xfs -f /dev/md0
to create an actual filesystem on your new RAID device.
  
Now you can mount the file system
   mkdir /MOUNTPOINT (for example /raid)
   mount /dev/md0 /MOUNTPOINT (for example /raid)
 
Verify the volume exists and the size you expected
df -h 
 
Edit /etc/fstab to make sure mount point comes back on reboot
/dev/md0 /raid xfs noatime,noexec,nodiratime 0 0

You have the new RAID based partition in your system.
Same procedure will work on both public EC2 cloud and VPC.

Provided by:Forthscale systems, cloud experts

How to update an auto scale launch configuration in Amazon EC

In order to update existing auto scale launch configuration in Amazon EC you need to create a new launch configuration using as-create-launch-config and then assign it to launch configuration using as-update-auto-scaling-group


Provided by:SiQ systems, Cloud experts

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Mounting S3 bucket as a file system on Linux (Ubuntu)

In order to mount S3 bucket on Linux you need to install ssh file system (FUSE) libraries first.

Install: aptitude install build-essential libcurl4-openssl-dev libxml2-dev libfuse-dev comerr-dev libfuse2 libidn11-dev libkadm55 libkrb5-dev libldap2-dev libselinux1-dev libsepol1-dev pkg-config fuse-utils sshfs

Follow the instantiations in S3fs WIKI:

https://code.google.com/p/s3fs/wiki/InstallationNotes

It was using http download, not SVN.

Create a mount point for the new file system (ex. mkdir /mnt/s3)

Mount the file system:

ex.: s3fs tmpname -o use_cache=/tmp -o allow_other /mnt/s3

this mount comes with option of using a tmp as a cache for S3 content, you can clean that cache as you feel fit.

You can also add your bucket to /etc/fstab

s3fs#mybucket /mnt/s3 fuse allow_other,url=https://s3.amazonaws.com 0 0

Update for mounting S3 bucket on CentOS 5.5 and other old distros.
CentOS 5.5 comes with old FUSE version 2.7.4 as latest in it`s repository.
You need to manually compile version 2.8.4 befor you can use S3fs.

Remove old FUSE
yum remove fuse fuse* fuse-devel

Install needed libraries:
yum install gcc libstdc++-devel gcc-c++ curl curl* curl-devel libxml2 libxml2* libxml2-devel openssl-devel mailcap

Download new FUSE from the Sourceforge:
wget "https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/fuse/fuse-2.X/2.8.4/fuse-2.8.4.tar.gz?r=&ts=1299709935&use_mirror=cdnetworks-us-1"

Untar and compile:

tar -xzvf fuse-2.8.4.tar.gz
cd fuse-2.8.4
./configure --prefix=/usr
make; make install


Configure FUSE in the system:
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib64/pkgconfig/
ldconfig
modprobe fuse

Confirm that 2.8.4 is the version of FUSE displayed :
pkg-config --modversion fuse

Proceed with regular S3FS installation.

Have questions? Just contact us right away and we will be happy to assist

Setting DNS server on Amazon EC2

Setting up bind9 DNS server on Amazon EC2 today tough me that Amazon`s built in service definition in security group only includes TCP. be sure to open UDP port 53 as well for your server to function properly.

Provided by:SiQ systems, Cloud experts