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Ask HN: What should I learn to make my full stack deployment easier?

by zman0225 on 6/27/14, 7:57 PM with 2 comments

I consider myself to be a novice full-stacker, with a preference for python. However, there's a lot of tools out there for many different purposes. I just wanted recommendation on what to learn/use to make my life easier. So... What is it that you guys use that can make my life a little easier? Don't be afraid to get specific (ex. docker, ansible.. etc)

  • by drygh on 6/27/14, 10:40 PM

    I recently picked up Ansible with nearly no system administration background. I came from a Python background, but I didn't want to learn Chef/Puppet/Salt since there is apparently a fairly significant learning curve.

    Anyway, Ansible has been great for small/medium sized projects. I haven't used it for anything large, so I can't really speak if you're planning on working on big projects. I was able to pick it up in a day, and after a few days I felt I was comfortable with it. For me, copying parts of other people's playbooks from Github and trying to understand it was the best way to learn after getting an overview from the documentation. Just start with something small - like installing & configuring a database, and work your way up the stack. Can't speak to any other dev-ops tools since Ansible is the first I've learned, but I've been happy with it.

  • by nickjj on 6/27/14, 11:40 PM

    I've been working with ansible recently and I really like it having spent a bit of time with chef prior to using ansible.

    I'm sticking with ansible for certain and I'm happy about it.

    Here's about a dozen ansible "roles" I've created if you want to poke around the code. They are all tested with travis ci too.

    https://github.com/nickjj/orats#ansible-roles-used

    It's geared towards deploying a rails app but a lot of it is neutral and the rails role itself could be adjusted for django/etc. without much work.

    There was a talk recently where a dude from twitter explained how they are using ansible to deploy many thousands of services so I'd say it scales.