Sommerfest bei gocept – Samstag 20. September 2014 ab 16 Uhr

english version below

Kein Sommer geht zu Ende ohne ein Fest in unserem tollen Garten. Wie in den letzten Jahren laden wir unsere Familien, Freunde und Mitstreiter ein. Für leckeres Essen, kühle Getränke und Unterhaltung ist gesorgt – kommt und feiert mit uns – wir bitten um Voranmeldung.

WANN: Samstag, 20. September ab 16 Uhr

WO: Forsterstr. 29, 06112 Halle (Saale)

KANN es nicht erwarten: mail@gocept.com

Übrigens, auch dieses Jahr bildet die Party einen Schlusspunkt zu unserem DevOps Sprint. Hier könnt ihr mehr darüber lesen: gocept DevOps Sprint

gocept summer party– Saturday, September 20th 4 pm

No summer ending without a party at the gocept garden. Like in previous years we invite our families, friends, and “brothers-in-arms”. As usual we serve delicious food, chilled drinks, and amusement – so come and join us – R.s.v.p.

WHEN: Saturday, September 20th from 4 pm

WHERE: Forsterstr. 29, 06112 Halle (Saale)

CAN’T wait for it: mail@gocept.com

Incidentally, the party is also the closing event for our DevOps sprint.

haproxy load-balancing for PHP applications with sticky sessions

We like applications that are written with a shared-nothing approach: it greatly simplifies running multiple instances on multiple hosts and allows for simple, robust load-balancer configuration.

Recently, we had to deploy a PHP application that – in the last minute – turned out to use PHP sessions and thus required sticky sessions.

We haven’t used sticky sessions in a while and the amount of reading required to find the specific working setup was substantial, so we’ll repeat here what a post at networkinghowtos.com already figured out:

backend default appsession PHPSESSID len 64 timeout 3h request-learn prefix

As you can see there isn’t much magic to it – the haproxy manual has a good in-detail explanation of the appsession option. The biggest point of this option is that you do not have haproxy injecting another session identifier but simply piggybacks on the existing one that PHP determines. Also, this option combines nicely with “leastconn” balancing if your application only uses cookies on a few selected pages and many users do not trigger getting a session cookie.

September, 18th–20th: DevOps Sprint

Since we have a strong history in web development, but also were involved in operating web applications we developed, the DevOps movement hit our nerves.

Under the brand name “Flying Circus” we are establishing a platform respecting the DevOps principles.

A large portion of our day-to-day work is dedicated to DevOps related topics. We like to collaborate by sharing ideas and work on tools we all need to make operations and development of web applications a smooth experience. A guiding question: how can we improve the operability of web applications?

A large field of sprintable topics comes to our mind:

Logging

Enable web application developers to integrate logging mechanisms into their apps easily. By using modern tools like Logstash for collecting and analyzing of the data, operators are able to find causes performance or other problems efficiently.

Live-Debugging and Monitoring

Monitoring is a must when operation software. At least for some people (including ourselves), Nagios is not the best fit for DevOps teams.

Deploying

We always wanted to have reproducable automated deployments. Coming from the Zope world, started with zc.buildout, we developed our own deployment tool batou. More recently upcoming projects, such as ansible, and tools (more or less) bound to cloud services like heroku.

Backup

After using bacula for a while, we started to work on backy, which aims to work directly on volume files of virtual machines.

and more…

Join us to work on these things and help to make DevOps better! The sprint will take place at our office, Forsterstraße 29, Halle (Saale), Germany. On September, 20th we will have a great party in the evening.

If you want to attend, please sign up on http://www.meetup.com/DevOps-Sprint/events/191582682/.

Accomodation

For your stay in Halle, we can recommend the following Hotels: “City Hotel am Wasserturm”, “Dorint Hotel Charlottenhof”, “Dormero Hotel Rotes Ross”. For those on budget, there is the youth hostel Halle (http://halle.djh-sachsen-anhalt.de/). Everything is in walking distance from our office.