PaaS

How to schedule background jobs using the clockwork-gem

Posted by Markus Schwed
on

First of all the most obvious question has to be discussed:

Why we can’t just use cron for scheduled jobs?

An essential part of a PaaS is to isolate running application instances from another. Therefore all application instances run in so called Warden containers. Warden is an operating system level virtualization framework shipped with Cloud Foundry, the foundation of anynines.

Most Warden containers will run application instances that will never need a CRON daemon. Running CRON jobs on application servers is generally not a good idea as it creates a coupling between application delivery and background processing. (more…)

PaaS

Protecting custom domains with HTTPS and custom SSL certificates

Posted by Oliver Wolf
on

Per default every application deployed on anynines is accessible via a subdomain of a9sapp.eu for both HTTP and SSL protected HTTPS.
However, in most cases applications should be accessible via a custom domain and, of course, this should be also possible via HTTP and HTTPS.

Anynines is based on Cloud Foundry, an open source PaaS. Hence, it is pretty easy to import your own domains and let them point to your application using functionality provided by Cloud Foundry. The anynines team has then added the missing link and created support for custom SSL certificates to protect your custom domains.

Running your applications on anynines gives you the possibility to set up an SSL certificate for your custom domains.

This blogpost guides you through the process of mapping your domain to an application running on anynines, getting and importing a SSL certificate to make your application available through the secure HTTPS protocol. (more…)

PaaS

Continuous Deployment with anynines, github and Travis CI

Posted by Julian Fischer
on

A few words about continuous deployment

Continuous deployment is part of the continuous delivery paradigm. The basic idea of continuous delivery is to automate the software delivery process as far as possible. This includes automated testing, continuous integration as well as continuous deployment.

Your continuous deployment benefits

With a working continuous deployment chain in place you gain the following benefits:

Git deployments
This prevents individual developers having uncommitted code.

Everything must be committed to be tested and everything must be tested to be deployed.

Easy to learn and use
As you will learn in this article continuous deployment is easy to setup. But more importantly, think of your growing team of developers. New team members have to learn how to use your CI and deployment process.

With a continuous deployment in place all they need to learn is to commit to a git repository.

Everybody can deploy
Many teams allow only certain members to deploy code. Why is that? Most likely either because of lacking trust within the team and/or because of complicated deployment procedures. You can get rid of both causes, easily by enforcing a CI along with an automated deployment. (more…)