Tag: Cloud Tools
What is Octopus Deploy?
In earlier, we did manual deployments of all out applications on all our servers. It took so much time for each deploy. After arriving of Octopus deploy and starting to use Octopus Deploy a deployment of a new release is done within a minute. All the steps to deploy an application become automated, which is a great leap forward and will save you time.
With all the templates you can use within Octopus Deploy there is always a solution for your software product to automate an installation.
Octopus Deploy is a cloud-based configuration management software that offers services like businesses control, audit, schedule, and manage deployments and operational runbooks from within a centralized platform.
Octopus Deploy is a continuous deployment service that allows deployments by automating, process including automated test executions in a single workflow. It is available both as a hosted service and as an on premise installation.
It helps employees with to store passwords and other confidential information on a centralized platform, ensuring data and user security.
Octopus Deploy lets you automate deployment tasks without having to write PowerShell. That includes:
- Replacing application settings
- Swapping connection strings
- Running environment-specific configuration transforms
- Configuring IIS application pools and web sites
- Installing and updating Windows Services
Advantages of Octopus Deployment
Octopus Deploy is compatible after you have over a couple or servers or over a couple of comes. You don’t wish developers publication from Visual Studio. Octopus Deploy makes it simple to deploy properly whenever.
Some of the Advantages are:
- Octopus uses a similar preparation packages across environments and makes it simple to trace their progress across those environments.
- Octopus makes it simple to handle configuration across environments that is typically a very troublesome task.
- Octopus Deploy is employed by our department to facilitate the preparation of the many applications to several servers.
- Octopus Deploy makes it terribly simple to deploy applications to 1 or many servers with the press of a button.
- Many various platforms, languages, and in operation systems area unit supported. You’ll be able to deploy to your own server or the cloud. You can deploy to Windows, Linux, etc.
- Many various “step templates” area unit enclosed, that create it terribly simple to deploy what you wish, however you wish. Like deploying over SSH, FTP, etc.
Conclusion
Is Octopus Deploy perfect? With time its foundation has proved to be worthy. We could say Octopus Deploy isn’t even fully finished, but with all the updates and community feedback the future is looking very bright. But the here and now matter most and I can’t speak highly enough for Octopus. If you’re looking to manage your deployments or get into continuous deployments, Octopus Deploy is there give a chance and you’ll see your work with ease.
If you want to know more about or want to learn Octopus Deploy, i would suggest you DevOpsScool, One of the best institute for Octopus Deploy Advance training both in Online and offline classroom mode.
EC2Deploy and the Cloud Tools Maven plugin are now available
I’m pleased to announce that EC2Deploy – a Groovy-based framework for deploying Java EE applications to Amazon EC2 – is now available as part of the Cloud Tools open source project.
There are three main parts to Cloud Tools:
- The EC2Deploy framework
- Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that are configured to run Tomcat and work with EC2Deploy
- A Maven plugin that uses EC2Deploy to deploy a web application to EC2
I’m especially excited about the Maven plugin. Once you have configured the plugin for your web application you can use the following goals:
- cloudtools:deploy – launch the EC2 instances and deploy the web application
- cloudtools:redeploy – redeploy the web application (upload the changes and restart tomcat)
- cloudtools:jmeter – run a Jmeter test
- cloudtools:stop – stop the EC2 instances
Cloudtools is still work in progress but it let’s you deploy a web application on EC2 in just a few minutes. To learn more go to Cloud Tools.
Cloud Tools now supports Amazon Elastic Block Store
One of the exciting new features of Amazon EC2 is Elastic Block Store, which provides truly durable storage for your instances. Prior to EBS, the contents of the file system disappeared once an instance was terminated. This meant that if you wanted to run a database server on EC2 you had to use MySql master-slave replication with frequent backups to Amazon S3. With EBS running a database on EC2 is a lot easier. You can simply create an EBS volume, attach it to an instance, and create a filesystem that gives you long-lived disk storage for your database. Moreover, you can easily back up an EBS volume by creating a snapshot (stored in S3). And, if you ever need to restore your data, you can create a volume from a snapshot.
Cloud tools now supports Amazon EBS. You can launch an application with a database stored on a brand new volume; on an existing volume; or on a volume created from a snapshot. You can also convert an already running application to use elastic block storage. Finally, you can create an EBS snapshot of the database. Currently, only the Maven plugin supports this functionality but I plan to update the Grails plugin shortly.
Please check out the project’s home page for more information and send me feedback.
Amazon EC2 key pairs and other stumbling blocks – Guide
While working with Cloud Tools and Cloud Foundry users, I have noticed that EC2 key pairs and security group configuration are common stumbling blocks for people who are new to Amazon EC2. When you sign up for an AWS account you get what can be, at first, a confusing set of credentials: an access key id, a secret access key, X509 certificate and a corresponding private key. You authenticate an AWS request using either the access key id and secret access key or the X509 certificate and private key. Some APIs and tools support both options, where was others support just one. And, to make matters worse, to launch an EC2 instance and access it via SSH you must use a (named) EC2 key pair. This EC2 key pair is not the same as the X509 certificate/private key given to you by AWS during sign up. But they are easily confused since they both consist of private and public keys.
You create a EC2 key pair by using one of the AWS tools: command line tools, ElasticFox plugin or the rather nice AWS console. Under the covers these tools make an AWS request to create the key pair.
Here is a screenshot of the AWS Console showing how you create a key pair.
There are three steps:
- Select Key Pairs
- Click Create Key Pair
- Enter the name of the Key Pair you want to create – you chose the name
The console will then create the key pair and prompt you to save the private key.
You specify the key pair name in the AWS request that launches the instances and specify the private key file as the -i argument to ssh when connecting to the instance.Just make sure you save the key pair in safe place.
Another stumbling block is that you need to enable SSH in the AWS firewall. Both Cloud Tools and Cloud Foundry use SSH to configure the instances and deploy the application. If SSH is blocked then they won’t work. Fortunately, the AWS firewall (a.k.a. security groups) is extremely easy to configure using the AWS tools – command line tools, ElasticFox plugin or the nice AWS console – by editing the default security group to allow SSH traffic.
The good news is that these are relatively minor hurdles to overcome. Once you have sorted out your EC2 key pair and edited the security groups to enable SSH using Cloud Tools or Cloud Foundry to deploy your web application is very easy.