Mozilla, the provider of the Firefox browser, scales up websites from thousands to hundreds of millions of users. This involves many strategies and tools, but in InfoQ's coverage of a presentation last month by Brandon Burton, web operations engineer at Mozilla, the emphasis on automation and improving the use of DevOps tools caught our eye.
To start, Mozilla will build out self-service deployments through Jenkins, the open-source continuous integration tool. Jenkins supports the kind of automation we like to see, by allowing push-button deployment of website changes. The continuous build speeds delivery, and execution monitoring makes it easier for operations folks to see if something is wrong. That means a lot less finger-pointing over mundane tasks and more collaboration on larger-scale issues.
The company will also build a platform-as-a-service for internal development teams on Stackato, a multiple-cloud testing and launch automation platform, which means less time spent on configuration, and better compliance and control for administrators.
The Mozilla team knows a thing or two about scaling, but what was most interesting was what they shared about scaling out web servers. In an interesting choice of words, Burton described web servers as being "disposable," meaning that they store no state locally, nor require persistence across HTTP requests. Through automation, web servers can be "disposed or added to a pool without affecting other web servers negatively." Further, Burton urged using automation to provision web servers that have a well-known operational state, which can be added to the existing pool of servers and manage updates across the entire pool. All of this spells out stability and smooth sailing for the operations team.
If an organization as important to the Web as Mozilla can trust automation and DevOps, maybe the time has come for all of us.
Learn More
- Gene Kim's Why We Need DevOps Now
- What's the impact of DevOps? Sign-up to receive the results of our DevOps survey
- Mitch Hashimoto's Stronger DevOps Culture with Vagrant and Puppet
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