NYCPHP Meetup

[Brian Williams]

implementing a solid, multi-phase 'development to production' system.

In my previous job there was a single system to go from development server
to production server - upload from the developement server to the production
server.  As with all companies, those in charge of giving the green light
for uploads had to view and approve pages/changes before it could go up.
When working on multiple tasks for the same website this became a very
visible PITA problem that stuck out its nose many many times.  It was made
even worse by the upper and middle management refusing to implement a 3
stage system that would allow for development, staging and production
servers - even though we had racks and racks of computers that ran VMWare
Virtual servers.

I supplied them with the easy to understand diagrams and how things would be
implemented and how the use of subversion, restricted access, etc could be
used to maintain integrity, and allow us to have a development environment,
a review/preview environment and the production environment and give us a
quick method to restore older versions of the site; and it all fell on deaf
ears.

I, and others, spent hundreds of hours verifying, double checking and
re-checking things on development and production and then ultimately have to
fix something on production because the production servers were a higher
version than the development version of php/mysql/etc.

so to make things easier, i suggest the following, which i feel are common
sense:

a) development, staging and production servers -- staging servers can all be
VMWare based servers.
b) use the same versions of software across all servers.

just my 2 cents


On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Leam Hall <leam at reuel.net> wrote:

> What could you tell the OS/hardware/infrastructure support folks that would
> help make you more productive?
>
> As great as PHP and Joomla are, there tends to be a divide in the folks who
> build the applications and those who support the servers the applications
> run on. My paid work is at the server level (Red Hat/Solaris) and I'm
> betting there are things my side could do better.
>
> What would help you be more productive? What could keep things clear and
> clean so we all get to spend the weekends with family? How can the server
> teams contribute to environment sustainability?
>
> Leam
> _______________________________________________
> New York PHP User Group Community Talk Mailing List
> http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
> http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.nyphp.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20090131/db1588cc/attachment.html>