good stuff

Looking back over the last year I was thinking about which new application has made the most impact in my day to day work. My first thought was Xen and what it’s done for the servers, but that path had been started down previous to me taking over the reigns as sysadmin. I don’t feel comfortable putting Xen in the category of applications either as it seems to be an ill fit. So the application I’d have to say has made the most impact in the way I handle things and the direction I’ve pushed the company down would be Webistrano. By implementing Webistrano I’ve been better able to setup beta, staging and production environments and the ease of the user interface has allowed me to remove myself from many of instances where I would be deeply involved in a deployment. Had it not been for our switch to Rails and the programmers pointing this tool out I doubt I would have ever entertained running it. Webistrano has also helped me enforce a better “hands off the production servers” policy, which I believe in the end will help us deliver a more reliable product. I’m not using Webistrano just for Rails either, it’s pushing some of our static sites out and updating a combined mod_perl and Rails application we are running. I’ve really just scratched the surface of what can be done with Webistrano (and Capistrano) and I’m looking forward to the point when I can spend more time developing the services a little more, get a better at ruby and author some better deployment addons.