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Capistrano

This is yet another tool in the armoury of a DevOps engineer. In simple terms, Capistrano is a remote server automation tool.

Capistrano Beach and Beach Road photo D Ramey Logan.jpg from Wikimedia Commons by D Ramey Logan, CC-BY-SA 3.0

Developed on Ruby, Rake, and SSH, this tool allows the DevOps team to deploy web applications to several machines simultaneously. Additionally, it also allows the engineer to script arbitrary workflows over SSH and automate common tasks in software teams.

The tool has a scripting approach, and hence it is very easy to tie it up with other scripting tools and form a part of larger toolset.

Some key features of Capistrano are:

  • Strong Convention: It has a standard deployment process that all Capistrano-enabled projects follow by default. Capistrano has a well defined structure which is easy to follow across the projects.
  • Multiple Stages: Once a flow is developed, you can simply parameterise the script for different stages/environments (QA, staging, UAT, and production)
  • Parallel Execution
  • Community driver
  • …

Many-a-times simple bash script can also do the job for a DevOps engineer. However, it always helps to have a structured way of automated deployment. Tools like this one allow the agile teams to achieve their goals in shorter timespan by automating simple tasks. Other similar tools include Ansible, Chef/Puppet etc. Even Docker can address some of the automation tasks if they are as simple as creating a new image and using it across the server farm.

Alternative DevOps Tools for Capistrano

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Telemetry

“What Gets Measured, Gets Improved” said by Legendary Peter Drucker and rightly so. Unless you know how something is performing, you can’t even plan to improve it. And this has become all the more important in current age of millions of applications and devices which operate all around us. If one wants to improve the usability and functioning of that App or that remote sensor, she would need to collect lot of data and this is where Telemetry” comes into picture.

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PPA

Hey! I have built this cool application for Ubuntu users. And I want other users to use it. Do you know how can I publish it? Worry not. Ubuntu has a way identified to help developers publish their applications and make them available for installation and regular updates through a standardized mechanism. PPA is your answer.

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Logstash

These days a typical deployment consists of at least a couple of servers, behind a load balancer and a database. As your application complexity grows, you continue to add more components. Then you start collecting tons of messages from logs of all these applications. And the problem starts there! It is not easy to keep track of logs from all these components and detect patterns or anomalies which could trigger further action. Logstash helps solve this problem.

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Prometheus

Nowadays, having several servers, load-balancers, API Gateways, and storage devices is a common thing. However, keeping the infrastructure up and running is still a complex task. The administrators need to identify potential problems due to the high availability requirement of several businesses. They strive to have the best tools at their disposal to ensure that they can see the trends and patterns about the health of the infrastructure. Prometheus is an open-source tool that is used to record real-time metrics and making it available through a flexible query model.

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