Devops

When I do DevOps, my ideal day is sitting with my feet up in the sunshine, doing very little active work. The monitoring alarms aren’t going off; the server alarms are quiet. The developers are happy; the managers are smiling. That’s the purpose of DevOps. To put in place the system that means the workflow between customer - manager - engineer happens without your active input. Because the team has spent time building a devops system that means everyone can just keep working without having to stop and wait for someone else to say “OK, start again”.

I run Luzme, an ebook search system, which runs 24x7 on about 30 virtual machines in 7 countries on 6 continents. This article explains how I setup Kubernetes from scratch on a set of VMs from Bytemark, to improve the way I use the infrastructure behind Luzme, using the new container-based technologies, such as Docker and Kubernetes, to provide a better, more maintainable, more scalable system Luzme uses a diverse stack of technologies, including Percona (a MySQL-compatible database), Firebase (real-time NoSQL), Redis, Celery, Django, Solr, AngularJS, Python.