Welcome to the Engineering Blog!

Micah Hausler - 14 August 2014

Welcome to Ambition’s Engineering blog! The engineering team will be updating this periodically with interesting programming solutions, infrastructure ideas, and general tech posts. Stay tuned for updates soon!

Using Boto to associate a domain to an ELB

Micah Hausler - 26 November 2013

The last few months at Ambition, we've been busy working on automated customer signup and setup. We currently set up a separate subdomain for each customer that points to an Elastic Load Balancer. Up to this point, activation of each new customer has been a manual process: Initializing servers, setting up an ELB, and pointing a new subdomain to that ELB through the AWS web console.

Syncing Django static and media files to S3

Micah Hausler - 10 September 2013

An early problem we had at Ambition was syncing user-uploaded profile photos and other content across multiple app servers. Originally, we used a shared NFS mount, (or as one engineer called it, the Nightmare File System) and that soon had its own set of I/O scaling issues. Seeking a more scalable solution as we moved into Amazon Web Services, we looked into django-storages, and specifically their s3boto backend. We also had much success with django-extensions sync_media_s3 for uploading existing media to S3.

Postgres 9.3 Salt State

Micah Hausler - 09 September 2013

Postgresql 9.3 has been released today! Here is a simple salt state for getting 9.3 installed on your Ubuntu system using the postgresql.org apt repository (as described on the postgres wiki).