Category Software Engineering

Introduction Containers have recently become a very popular delivery mechanism for software applications. This is in part due to the popularity of the microservices software architecture pattern, which encourages delivering applications as a set of discrete, independent, loosely-coupled services. A microservice is an ideal payload for the container abstraction. Perhaps, the biggest influence, however, has […]

Introduction In this article, we’ll cover five tips for writing effective Capybara tests, and how to use them with RSpec and Minitest. What is Capybara? Capybara is an acceptance test framework for web applications. It’s a common choice for end-to-end, acceptance, or integration testing in Rails applications. It allows developers to simulate a user on […]

Introduction In this tutorial, we’re going to cover the following: Dockerizing a Node.js application, Setting up an AWS EC2 Container Service architecture with CloudFormation, and Hooking up a CI/CD pipeline with Semaphore. The end goal is to have a workflow that allows us to push code changes up to GitHub and have them seamlessly deployed […]

Introduction This tutorial will illustrate how you can use AWS CodeDeploy, a scalable deployment service offered by AWS that lets you automate your deployment process. We will package and continuously deploy a Go application to an EC2 instance. The tutorial will use a sample application and walk you through the process of updating your existing […]

The microservice architecture has recently been gaining traction, with many companies sharing their positive experiences with applying it. The early adopters have been tech behemoths such as Amazon and Netflix, or companies with huge user bases like SoundCloud. Based on the profiles of these companies and the assumption that there’s more complexity to running and […]

We’re happy to announce a new Semaphore feature that will help you monitor and improve your CI speed over time. We’re calling it CI Speed Insights, and it’s available to all Semaphore users as of today.

Ruby and Rails are slow — this argument is often used to downplay the worth of the language and the framework. This statement in itself is not false. Generally speaking, Ruby is slower than its direct competitors such as Node.js and Python. Yet, many businesses from small startups to platforms with millions of users use […]

Introduction Mocking is simply the act of replacing the part of the application you are testing with a dummy version of that part called a mock. Instead of calling the actual implementation, you would call the mock, and then make assertions about what you expect to happen. What are the benefits of mocking? Increased speed […]

At Rendered Text, we like to decompose our applications into microservices. These days, when we have an idea, we think of its implementation as a composition of multiple small, self-sustaining services, rather than an addition to a big monolith. In a recent Semaphore product experiment, we wanted to create a service that gathers information from […]

Continuous integration (CI) is confusing. As with all ideas, everybody does their own version of it in practice. CI is a solution to the problems we face while writing, testing and delivering software to end users. Its core promise is reliability.

Introduction Routes provide benefits to the users of our applications. While routes are not necessary in all applications, they make applications shine a little brighter. Having routes in your application gives users the ability to return to a specific point in your application just by typing in a URL. Testing routes comes with some interesting […]

Introduction Testing is one of the ways to ensure the quality of our application, and it comes in many forms. The best known and the most popular among developers is unit testing. However, depending on what, how, and when we are testing, there are other options, e.g. integration, regression, load, acceptance testing, system, end- to-end, […]

Originaly published on https://devops.college. Republished with author’s permission. If you’re reading this, dear Devop, you can probably remember a time before you were a Devop, or a Site Reliability Engineer, or whatever. Back to a time when you were a Systems Administrator, or a Unix Technician, or an Infrastructure Engineer; when your job involved switch […]

Post originally published on https://www.madewithtea.com. Republished with author’s permission. TLDR: Kafka Streams is a deployment-agnostic stream processing library written in Java. Even though Kafka has a great test coverage, there is no helper code for writing unit-tests for your own Kafka Streams topologies. I wrote a little helper library Mocked Streams in Scala, which allows […]

Introduction This tutorial will show you how to deploy a sample microservices application to Kubernetes and set up continuous deployment using SemaphoreCI. It includes a crash introduction to Kubernetes, Google Container Engine, and building an automated deploy process. Kubernetes, or “k8s” for short, is an orchestration tool for container native applications. Note that Kubernetes is […]