The Application Appliance

This post is the continuation of a thread that started with: Opportunities

The hardware it's self would not be remarkable in anyway and since I'm really only interested in the software stack the logical choice is to resell some other vendors machines preconfigured to meet my needs.

At this point I'm not exactly sure who's machines I'll use but I'd prefer it to be a vendor that sees Ubuntu (or maybe Debian) as a first class target. My short list at the moment really only contains System76 so if anyone has any other suggestions I'd love to hear from you?

The software on the other hand is much more interesting. The software will be delivered through a private apt repository as customized packages and include specifically configured base tools such as Apache, Postgres and Ruby as well as management tools for deployment, monitoring, replication and backup.

Now obviously there's nothing special about this approach, in fact that's kind of the point. I don't want to have to re-think the simple standard parts I want to focus on the newer more unique parts. The management tools, replication and fail over to cloud services, etc...

More later....

My Opinionated Application Stack

This post is the continuation of a thread that started with: Opportunities

Recently I've been thinking a lot about different ways to minimize duplication of work. Many of my projects have similar requirements, how best can I reuse the effort from one to the next?

I've also been puzzling over another problem; How do I provide businesses with reliable application when they don't have the necessary I.T. support to manage it and they don't have a reliable enough internet connection to go the "software as a service" route?

It turns out that both questions may have the same answer. An application appliance! A low cost plug and play application server that's configured with a well defined software stack and the ability to backup to a remote service that is able to double as a warm standby in a pinch.

In future posts I'll explain in more detail.