Tag Archives: OctopusDeploy

Stop Thinking About Servers

Every so often I get a request, from one or more of our developers, for Remote Desktop access to the servers running their code – be it for troubleshooting, configuration or some other arcane purpose.

My answer is almost uniformly “no”.

WAT

“But surely,” says the cat “you’re a super-futuristic DevOps shop spoken of in breathless terms by national IT publications? Don’t you trust your developers??”

Of course we do. But…

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Friday, Friday. Gotta get down on Friday

A few of you might have spotted this via the Octopus Deploy June newsletter.

Friday

You might be wondering how it’s done, as at least one person has requested via Twitter. Well wait no longer. Here’s how it’s done.

What you’re looking at is a Slack notification from Octopus Deploy, featuring a little image that’s been doing the rounds on Twitter. It exists already as a Capistrano template, and I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to do in Octopus. Continue reading →

My new favourite feature

As our cloud server fleet grows, the DevOps team is increasingly nickel-and-dimed with small requests and troubleshooting tasks, for which we sometimes needed to RDP into instances. Indeed it’s for this reason that my Connect-RobotArmyv2Group and Connect-EC2Instance scripts were put together. But it’s far from ideal. For one thing, RDPing into individual instances is very Anticloud indeed.

But, we think we’ve got it under control now, and as per usual, it’s down to our trusty multi-limbed friend, OctopusDeploy.

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Web-enabled S3 bucket migration using OctopusDeploy and PowerShell

I recently had to move a fairly large, fairly heavily trafficked web-enabled S3 bucket between two different AWS accounts. This turned out to be ever so slightly more than a simple drag-and-drop or copy operation.

Why? Well because it was web-enabled, mostly. Web-enabled S3 buckets have some restrictions on what they can be called, and buckets must be given a unique name. So you can’t just create a new webenabledbucket.com.au bucket in account B, copy the data across, flip the DNS and delete the bucket from account A. AWS won’t let you.

You have to have an intermediate stage where your files can live while the old bucket is deleted and the new one is provisioned. Which is where OctopusDeploy and the mighty Robot Army came to the rescue. Continue reading →