DevOps and deployment
Practical writing on cloud providers, infrastructure, deployment and cost, from the team behind the BuyCloudExpress catalogue.
Droplets or App Platform: picking the right DigitalOcean product
DigitalOcean offers a raw virtual machine and a managed application platform. The choice is really about how much operational work you want to own, and it…
A first production deployment on DigitalOcean, start to finish
The path from an empty account to an application serving real traffic over HTTPS, with the security and backup steps that are easy to skip and…
Choosing a Linux distribution for a cloud server
The distribution decides how often you are interrupted, how long the machine remains supported, and how easily you can find an answer at two in the…
SSH keys, properly
Most people generate one key, copy it everywhere, and never think about it again. A slightly better practice costs ten minutes and removes several genuinely bad…
Load balancers, explained without the diagram
A load balancer does more than spread traffic. Its health checks, connection draining and TLS handling are what turn a deployment from disruptive into invisible.
DNS for people who deploy things
DNS causes an outsized share of deployment incidents, almost always through the same handful of misunderstandings about caching, record types and delegation.
Running containers on a single server
Containers are useful long before you need an orchestrator. On one server they solve dependency conflicts, make deployments repeatable and make the machine disposable.
When Kubernetes is the wrong answer
Kubernetes solves real problems very well. Adopting it before you have those problems trades a small amount of deployment friction for a large amount of permanent…
CI/CD onto a cloud server without a platform
A reliable deployment pipeline onto a plain server needs four things. None of them require a deployment platform, and all of them are worth having before…
Infrastructure as code: a starting point that does not overwhelm
You do not need to define your entire estate in code to get most of the benefit. Start with the parts that would be painful to…
Zero-downtime deploys on modest infrastructure
Seamless releases are usually presented as a property of large platforms. The mechanism is simple enough to implement on two servers, or even one.