Web Ops

At lightning speed, this workshop will cover the bits that aren’t code that make up a working web app. These include servers, monitoring, deployment mechanisms, logging, alerting, secret management, recovery mechanisms… you get the idea.

Topics include:

  • how to set up a web server on Linux,
  • deploying changes to a web server with zero downtime,
  • keeping an eye on your server to make sure things are working,
  • tracking down production bugs,
  • managing persistent data (such as your database),
  • secure communication over HTTPS,
  • and, if we have time, how to do all this in the buzzword of the decade, containers.

The workshop is designed to run on Unix-like machine such as Linux or macOS. If you're running on Windows, we can make it work, but it won't be quite so true to real life.

Following along at home

If you want to go through it on your own, follow the prerequisites, then the playbook.

Running this workshop yourself

You're welcome to run this workshop yourself by following the playbook and making changes as necessary.

You'll need to follow the prerequisites ahead of the workshop, and ask students to run the client-side preparation in that document. I recommend you do a dry run yourself.

All I ask is that:

  1. you tell me you're running it (you can reach me over Twitter or via email),
  2. you send feedback about how you found it, and
  3. if you find problems, you tell me about them (or even send pull requests).

Good luck!

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.