October 11, 2013: This Week at Engine Yard

Today I’m heading up to Redmond to talk all things Windows Azure and learn about the cool stuff the Microsoft Cloud team is working on (following in the footsteps of the New York Times, as it turns out)! Back in Platform land, here’s some cool stuff we released this week!

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

Based on a customer requests in our forum, platform deployment engineer extraordinaire Martin Emde has added the ability to add post-deploy hooks.

Post-deploy hooks are placed at the outer edges of the deploy task. Before deploy hooks trigger immediately after the active_release directory is created on all the servers. Thi sis the earliest it is possible to run the before hook with the expectation that paths will be correct and usable.

after_deploy will trigger at the very end of the deploy before the script exits. This runs after maintenance pages are removed, and after the git garbage collection tasks.

This will be useful for you if, like our requester, you have a long job you need to run that does not affect your customers but is triggered by a deploy. This way you can now have the maintenance page down and business as usual, while still triggering the job as part of your deploy.

Please let us know if you have any feedback! To try this out you will need to upgrade to the latest version of serverside.

Martin has blogged all about the awesome new CLI updates here!

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

Tuesday, October 15th, 7PM: Engine Yard’s Dublin HQ is hosting the Ruby Ireland meetup group. This week’s topic: lessons learned from re-implementing an existing DSL in Ruby.

Articles of Interest

The New York Times is doing a series of articles about the cloud, “The Cloud Factories,” all of which investigate the phenomena around building, maintaining, and moving to the cloud at a more social level. The first article (there are currently a series of three, and video features), “Power, Pollution, and the Internet,” is here.

Nest Labs released a new product with their take on the smoke detector! Nest Labs’ Operations team released their take on major releases by handing out “No Clown Shoes” badges of honor to developers who behaved themselves under the heat of a deadline.