Debugging

A while back, when I was just starting to get more hands-on with AWS and infrastructure, I ran into a performance issue that took me longer than I’d like to admit to figure out. At the time, we were upgrading one of our Rails applications to a newer version. Instead of upgrading the existing EC2 instance, we decided to provision a new one and deploy the application there. It felt like the safer approach since we could leave the old server untouched until we were confident everything was working as expected. ...

A while back, I was migrating a Rails eCommerce application to a new server. The migration itself was pretty straightforward. I provisioned the new server, copied over the deployment configuration, and started bringing the application online. One thing I hadn’t set up yet was Redis. Since I wasn’t planning on using caching immediately, I figured I could leave it for later. As part of that, I removed the REDIS_CACHE_URL environment variable from the deployment configuration. ...