freistil News
As GigaOm reports, Edward Snowden’s email provider LavaBit got shut down under strange circumstances. This incident adds more fuel to the running discussion how much power law enforcement and other state agencies should have over information trusted to internet service providers.
In this regard, Ladar Levison, the creator of LavaBit, comes to a devastating conclusion:>”This experience has taught me one very important lesson: Without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”
It’s important to note that “physical ties” is not limited to just companies located in the US. For example, while Amazon Web Services do have a hosting location in Europe, they’re no less an american company. And it’s unclear how much access US agencies actually have to data stored by Amazon, even if it’s hosted in Europe.
With freistilbox, on the other hand, the situation is transparent: freistilbox is hosted in data centres in Germany and the german data protection laws are among the most restrictive ones in the world. That means your data is guaranteed all the legal conditions regarding data protection and information security that your business needs, especially if it’s operating in international markets.
If you have any questions regarding the security of your data on freistilbox, we’re happy to answer them. Just drop us a line!
09 Aug 2013
Much too quickly, the Drupal Dev Days in Dublin were over. About 150 people had come to do code sprints, pub tours and participate in talks about project management, Drupal internals and — looking at myself — building virtual development environments. (More on that later.)
We were lucky that the Dublin Institute of Technolgy provided the conference venue for free. Its building in Aungier Street was easy to reach and had more than enough space for us. Thanks, DIT!
freistil IT supported the Dev Days as Gold Sponsor and we’re very happy with our engagement. freistilbox was featured prominently both at the conference venue and at the Odeon where we had the freistilbox Party with drinks and barbecue on Saturday night. The organization team managed to answer all our questions quickly and always kept us up-to-date on what was relevant for us as a sponsor.
We participated in the Job Speed Dating on Friday afternoon, but unfortunately, there were only a handful of interested applicants. Actually, there were quite obviously more companies looking for people than people looking for jobs. But that doesn’t make the idea of quickly connecting job seekers with relevant businesses a bad one. On the contrary, we hope that more conferences are going to add such an event to their programme!
The session schedule on Saturday and Sunday was diverse and interesting. (I have to say that it made me sad to see attendance dropping heavily on Sunday, probably because of the freistilbox Party the night before.) Together with Steven Jones and Marcus Deglos, I gave an introduction into easy VM management with Vagrant. In my part, I highlighted how using automation tools like Chef simplify setting up an individual system configuration from scratch that can then be replicated exactly and within minutes.
Since I’m going to move to Ireland next month, I was double happy to visit the green island for Drupal Dev Days. I enjoyed my stay very much and would like to thank everyone for making it a great Drupal community event! Special thanks go to the organization team for their tremendous efforts. Togha oibre!
08 Jul 2013
We’re very busy preparing for the Drupal Dev Days in Dublin in a few weeks! Aside from supporting the event as GOLD sponsor, we’ll be giving a talk about automating your development environment. And with “ freistilbox Solo “, we’ll also be presenting the first release of our standalone development environment for freistilbox users!
When, a few days ago, the event organizers asked us if we’re interested in also sponsoring the social event, we happily said yes! So, be our guests and join the freistilbox Party on Saturday night!
Will you be at the Drupal Dev Days and would like to learn more about freistilbox? Please drop us a line and we’ll make sure to talk to you!
11 Jun 2013
As I already posted on my personal blog, I’ll be at DevOps Days Berlin next week. If you’re going to be there, too, I’d like to meet you! Simply drop me a line in advance or say Hello to me there!
I’ll tweet updates from the conference mostly from my personal account, so make sure to follow both @freistil and @geewiz.
22 May 2013
In his blog post “Chef Cookbooks for Busy Ruby Developers”, Huiming Teo announces two Chef cookbooks that make setting up a Ruby on Rails development environment easier and quicker:
Since they run with Chef Solo, the cookbooks don’t require a Chef server.
Huiming’s cookbooks are a great example how automation can be very effective even for small installations. We’re busy building something similar for our freistilbox hosting platform.
And if you’d like to learn how to use Chef for automating many hundred servers, join our operations team!
14 May 2013
###Preparing for Dublin
The european Drupal Dev Days will be one of, if not the most important events for us this year. Since they’re only a few weeks away, we’re preparing for the developer meet-up on several fronts. Markus is in charge of the marketing side and he’s been busy this week creating a handout that properly conveys why Drupal developers want to use freistilbox as their hosting platform. Jochen will cover the technological aspect. This week, he started not only preparing a talk about replicable development environments but also building one that can be installed with a single command. We’re going to start a beta test soon; drop us a note if you’re interested!
###Documentation
There isn’t a day when we don’t realise that there’s still too much knowledge buried in our heads instead of being readily available to the rest of the team. We’ve made it an unwritten rule to immediately add a snippet to our company wiki when something like that comes up. (And yes, we should put this rule in writing, too…) This week, we’ve started a new wiki section named “Service Runbooks”. For every service we use (for example, our backup system), we aim to have a complete documentation of its purpose, its actual implementation, standard operating procedures, caveats, troubleshooting hints and references to further information. A great help in building this kind of documentation quickly is the ability of Confluence to define pre-filled template pages.
###Stats
Help Center: This week, we received 25 new tickets and resolved 25, leaving us with 61 open support requests.
That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend, everyone!
11 May 2013
The Drupal Dev Days in Dublin are coming up and we are very happy to be gold sponsor of this great event. We’ve started working on our own session and are excited to present a great development tool for freistilbox users at the conference!
Last year in Barcelona, I did a talk about “ Staging with git and Drush”. The video recording of this talk got published a couple of days ago together with my slides:
08 May 2013
Recently, I attended the Open Source Datacenter Conference, short OSDC, in Nuremberg. This is a short review of my experience.
The three-day conference is hosted by Netways, an IT services company specialised in Open Source Software, just like ourselves.
I arrived on Tuesday night at about 20:30. Dinner was arranged so that even late arrivals could still get something to eat. Even better was that I found five ex-colleagues back from the good old WEB.DE days gathered around a table. A great start to a great conference.
To be exact, the conference had already started in the morning with workshops. But since I didn’t attend them, I can’t say anything about these.
As the conference programme was structured into the tracks “Cloud & Big Data”, “DevOps and Methods” and “Infrastructure Services”, it covered three of the hottest topics in IT at the moment.
On Wednesday, I attended these talks:*“2000 databases later”: A great look behind the scenes at Booking.com, especially their huge MySQL installation. Kris Köhntopp is a brilliant IT operations expert and his opening session, both informative and entertaining, set the bar to a height that IMHO no subsequent speaker was able to reach.
- “Introduction to NoSQL with Couchbase 2.0”: CouchBase promises to be an in-place replacement for Memcached which we’re using heavily for freistilbox. But its lack of redundancy is a problem, so I was looking forward to Tugdual Grall’s talk. I left it confident that CouchBase is worth doing a proof of concept installation.
- “Petabyte storage with Ceph”: As storage technology is another essential topic at freistil IT, attending Martin Gerhard Loschwitz’s talk was a no-brainer. Ceph is getting more interesting every time I hear about it but I don’t think we’ll be using it anytime soon.
- “Configuration management and Linux packages”: The approach of distributing service configurations by auto-generating and deploying config packages certainly is better than doing it manually. But since, compared for example with Chef, it solves only a small part of the system management problem, Schlomo Schapiro could not convince me that this is a way to go in 2013.
- Jan Doberstein finished the first conference day with “The truth is in the logs”. His overview of useful log management tools confirmed that we need to get Logstash running ASAP.
In the evening, we left the hotel together for dinner and drinks at the “Indabahn” bar. I spent most of the time chatting with my ex-colleagues (when they weren’t occupied with playing Ingress) about what’s going on in our jobs and lives.
After some good night’s sleep (note to self: make sure to switch off the AC first thing after getting into hotel rooms in the future), I started refreshed into the second half of the conference:*“lxc@libvirt”: We’re already using LXC for freistilbox and I hoped to perhaps catch a few new tidbits. But not only did Erkan Yanar only scratch the surface, his way of presenting also seemed to me unstructured and improvised, so I left his session disappointed.
- “PostgreSQL in 2013”: While we’re using MySQL almost exclusively, PostgreSQL is gaining more and more traction (for example as the main RDBMS at Heroku) and we’ll need to run it in production for the Chef v11 release. So Michael Renner’s overview over recent developments in the PostgreSQL world provided a good way for me to get up-to-date.
- “Introduction into Hadoop”: Olivier Renault’s session was another opportunity to learn more about a topic I’ve got no personal experience with.
In the evening, I left OSDC 2013 with a lot of new ideas, many of them spawned by simple side remarks of speakers or experiences shared by other participants. That’s what makes OSDC for me worth attending every time, even if I’m already familiar with many of the topics presented there. I’m going to propose a session myself again next year.
Since there were always two talks at a time, I could not attend all the sessions I had been interested in. Sometimes, I also gave preference to the “hallway track”, ie. talking to other conference attendees outside. I’m going to complete my knowledge intake as soon as the session video recordings are available.
The only downside for me was the long train ride to and from Nuremberg. This will change next year when I’ll be able to fly directly to Berlin where the conference will take place from 2014 on. See you there!
PS: There are just too many interesting IT conferences and DevOps meetups for our small team to attend! Help us!
29 Apr 2013