Yesterday I attended my first TriZPUG meeting to check out Kurt Grandis' talk on Fabric, “a Python library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks.”
It was pretty cool to see a bunch of guys who share the same interests take some time on a Thursday to hang out, drink beers, and chat about python, django, zope, and other stuff. After the original talk was over and some of the other lightening talks that succeeded it was over, a couple of things became very clear to me:
- There was a real need to make it easier for system administrators and OPS people to handle the difficult task of deploying and maintaining systems, cloud or not;
- Some of the tools and/or tool implementations presented were being used in an attempt to minimize this pain, but you were still pretty much had no control over what made its way to the systems in the end of the process;
Having been using rBuilder Online to manage and maintain my Transifex Appliance, and being somewhat “spoiled” with the ability of having fine grained control over the entire software stack and having the option of deploying my final “product” on several different cloud environments, I couldn’t help but offer to speak a bit about my experience. I sure hope my impromptu presentation didn’t come across as being “just a sell’s pitch” and I definitely tried my best not to sound like I was selling something. I truly feel that the technology developed here at rPath can solve many of the typical issues that people have getting their product through the many different life cycles and eventually out the door and into the hands of their customers!
Today I started going through Fabric’s documentation and am already making plans to include it in some of the test automation tools we’re developing here!
Anyhow, after my presentation there was a quick intro to epdb, the “Extended Python Debugger”, a very cool python debugger developed by an ex-rPathian and something I use on a daily basis! Turns out that the epdb currently packaged for Foresight Linux was outdated, so I spent a few minutes during my lunch today to update it. If you’re running Foresight, just run *conary update epdb=:2-devel* or wait for it to make its way to the stable label. If you’ve never heard of epdb, I strongly suggest you give it a try!