April 11, 2014: This Week at Engine Yard

Gearing up for ChefConf and learning what all our DevOps friends have been up to next week, hope to see you there!

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

Computers can be weird sometimes, and there are few people who appreciate the depth of that weirdness more than we do. Sometimes, for example, your application cluster may get into a pattern where application masters are being taken over repeatedly, and you really want to know why. To help expose that extra level of debugging, we have released an optional feature into GA: application master takeover preference.

If your application master keeps going on vacation without leaving a note saying why, this is the feature for you. When a takeover occurs, the old application master will be saved as a utility instance that is not serving any traffic, so you can SSH into the box and investigate what is up with its shoddy work ethic. As always, if you need extra help, you can always open a ticket with our support team too!

This feature is intended only for that extra level of debugging, and is not recommended as a default configuration.

A bunch of other updates are chronicled in our regular release notes!

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

ScaleConf, April 10-11, Cape Town, South Africa: a two day conference that focuses on the problems faced in building and running services on the internet today. Platform engineering legend Shai Rosenfeld will be presenting on concurrency and scaling!

ChefConf, April 15-17, San Francisco, California: Learn and share best practices for whipping up awesome in workshops, presentations and training with our favorite people in the world—the Chef Community. Ryan Souza, platform engineer extraordinaire, will be speaking, having made the long trek from the northern wilds of Portland, Oregon. Keep an eye out for his evil twin, the Fake Ryan Souza, he may make an appearance as well.

Articles of Interest

A brilliantly simple explanation of the Heartbleed bug by the excellent xkcd.