Here at OpenIssue, we think a lot about the web. I mean, a LOT. And we’ve been thinking a lot about web hosting, and the varied flavors it comes in. We’re working to figure out what makes sense for us to use and implement, and what makes sense for us to recommend to our clients. A while ago, we decided, like many folks, virtual private servers were going to be the preferred hosting set up. Not that it’s right for all organizations – but for many who invest significant dollars into implementation of a website or CiviCRM, the advantages of a VPS will likely outweigh the higher monthly cost.
We started using Slicehost, which was incredibly easy to set up and use, and was acquired by Rackspace, which is considered the premium dedicated server hosting company. I then soon discovered a service called Cloudkick, which allowed us to monitor all of our slices and our clients slices in one dashboard. That was very cool.
It turns out that in the process of creating Cloudkick, the folks there came up with libcloud – a library that service providers could use to give developers access to the services needed by the servers – list, restart, create, destroy, etc. There are now a number of cloud hosting service providers, such as Rackspace cloud servers (used to be Mosso), Slicehost, and Amazon, that are beginning to support libcloud. Libcloud has become it’s own open source project, and is under active development.
Hopefully, this will provide a plethora of options for folks in terms of being able to monitor and manage the varied cloud servers they’ve got going. It certainly has already made our lives a lot easier.
Tagged as:
cloud,
hosting,
libcloud
Here’s a broad ranging list of interesting tidbits I’ve found recently.
Tagged as:
nptech
Any consulting shop that does significant amounts of implementation and development (as we do) needs a project management and ticketing tool. Basecamp seems to be a standard that many people have reached for. We were using Intervals for a while, which is really a fabulous tool if you do a lot of hourly consulting. We also have been using Google spreadsheets for some elements of project management.
All tools have their strengths and weaknesses. And, in addition, the best tool does nothing without good human project management skills using it. As a shop that practices Agile development (we use an adaptation of scrum methodology that seems to work for a shop that does multiple projects with small teams,) finding a good tool that facilitates instead of hobbles Agile was critical for us.
We found, and have chosen to use Redmine for our project management/ticketing system. You can think of it as a multi-project version of Trac, which is a fabulous ticketing/wiki system that we were initially going to go with. Redmine has the elements of Trac that we liked, with the added ability to track multiple projects. Like Basecamp, Redmine has document storage and messaging systems. It doesn’t have milestones per se, but it does allow you to see tasks in calendar and Gantt views, which is very helpful. Unlike Basecamp, you can add custom fields to tickets, users and other features. Having spent many hours in Basecamp, I actually like Redmine much better. It does even do time tracking, which we won’t use, but is nice to know is there. And the wiki is nice. Basecamp’s Writeboards seem so much more like an add on than integrated.
It’s a Ruby on Rails application, and that was actually kind of fun to finally get to install and play with RoR a tiny bit. And it’s great that it’s free and open source. Although that wasn’t an absolute requirement for us, it is most definitely a plus, given so much of our work is implementing open source web tools. And it’s nice to save a few bucks per month.
Tagged as:
nptech,
opensource,
tools,
web