The Pipeline
All things continuous integration, devops & continuous delivery. Follow us @snap_ci
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Snap is Going Away
Feb 6, 2017 06 Feb 2017We have some sad news to share. Today we are announcing the end of life (EOL) for Snap CI. The planned final day will be August 1st 2017.
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Lessons learned as Snap CI Product Manager
Jan 17, 2017 17 Jan 2017I wanted to take a look at my first year as the product manager for Snap CI and share with you my top 5 lessons learned from 2016.
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10 Snap CI articles to bring with you to a desert island
Dec 13, 2016 13 Dec 2016Here’s our 2016 review on the most popular articles on Snap CI’s The Pipeline blog. Great reading for that isolated desert island.
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The challenge to go faster: Ways we make this happen with Snap CI
Dec 6, 2016 06 Dec 2016Caching is a very common way to speed up builds by storing local files and dependencies that are needed for your builds instead of getting them from their respective mirrors on the internet each time one runs a pipeline.
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Snap CI Deployments to DigitalOcean via SCP and SSH
Nov 22, 2016 22 Nov 2016How to get your Snap CI builds deployed on DigitalOcean Droplet
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WTF are Deployment Pipelines?
Nov 15, 2016 15 Nov 2016A beginner’s guide to understanding continuous delivery
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Using LXD and cgroups
Nov 1, 2016 01 Nov 2016We’ll create a container and then constrain the number of processes that container can spawn so a rogue user can’t create a fork bomb inside of it!
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How Linux Containers Work
Oct 25, 2016 25 Oct 2016What are containers, how do they work, and what is LXC?
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Reasons to visit the Snap booth at RubyConf
Oct 19, 2016 19 Oct 2016Caricatures, Ruby, and Snap, oh my!
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Flipping the Switch on Jenkins
Oct 10, 2016 10 Oct 2016ThoughtWorks said “HOLD” regarding Jenkins as a deployment pipeline on their Tech Radar earlier this year. We think that Snap CI is a great alternative to Jenkins. But why?
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5 Takeaways from GitHub Universe
Oct 4, 2016 04 Oct 2016I went to GitHub Universe. I heard stuff. I liked some of it. Hopefully you will too.
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Zero, One, Infinity
Sep 27, 2016 27 Sep 2016Willem Louis van der Poel came up with the zero, one, infinity heuristic. We find that remains a useful way to think of design parameters and constraints.
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Snap CI > Jenkins
Sep 13, 2016 13 Sep 2016Here are three compelling reasons why fast-moving, successful software development teams are choosing Snap CI for continuous integration and continuous deployment over tools like Jenkins.
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Why Continuous Delivery and DevOps are Product Managers’ Best Friends
Sep 6, 2016 06 Sep 2016Why should you care about these practices? Here’s why continuous delivery is a product manager’s new BFF.
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5 CI/CD Strategies for Faster Software Deployments and Better Automation
Aug 30, 2016 30 Aug 2016Here are five ways to increase speed through continuous delivery and continuous integration practices.
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Using Chef in a Blue-Green World
Aug 23, 2016 23 Aug 2016Most applications these days have some form of deployment automation which is often implemented using an Infrastructure as Code tool. So what role do these tools play in a blue-green world?
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Failure is an Option - Lessons from Snap CI: Part 3 of 3
Aug 16, 2016 16 Aug 2016Lessons I learned the hard way about disappearing packages, rebuilding regularly, and more.
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Failure is an Option - Choose When to Fail: Part 2 of 3
Aug 9, 2016 09 Aug 2016In this second part, we learn about why dark launching, or feature toggles, become important when deploying to production daily
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Failure is an Option: Part 1 of 3
Aug 2, 2016 02 Aug 2016Lessons I learned the hard way about scripting, database migrations, and more.
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No One Agrees How to Define CI or CD
Jul 26, 2016 26 Jul 2016Our contextual research findings about CI, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment and DevOps
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Going Serverless with Snap CI, Amazon API Gateway, Lambda, and Swagger
Jul 19, 2016 19 Jul 2016How serverless architecture allowed a news site to try new things and move faster.
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One Day. Dozens of Volunteers. Hundreds of Cans. (And a CI Tool)
Jul 12, 2016 12 Jul 2016How Snap CI helped a charity project track everything and the importance of understanding your users to make better technology and design choices and build better products.
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Different Ways to Structure Your Chef Code
Jul 5, 2016 05 Jul 2016The pros and cons of having your chef code with your code and in a separate repo
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The Product Managers’ Guide to Continuous Delivery and DevOps
Jun 28, 2016 28 Jun 2016A guide to learning about what and how DevOps and Continuous Delivery means to Product Managers.
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From the Snap Support Team: Common NPM issues
Jun 21, 2016 21 Jun 2016Here are three easy troubleshooting tips for common problems on Snap
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Using Feature Toggles on Snap CI a.k.a. Dark Launching
Jun 17, 2016 17 Jun 2016Feature Toggles, sometimes referred to as Dark Launching, was something we eventually grew into on Snap CI. Learn about our evolution here.
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Short on Translators, Syrian Crisis Workers Use Apps
Jun 14, 2016 14 Jun 2016Google, MercyCorps, ThoughtWorks, and UNHCR Join Forces to Create Aid-Focused Translation App
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Welcome Aurora and Cybele
Jun 9, 2016 09 Jun 2016Why we named our new stacks Aurora and Cybele
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Breeding Cobras, Brown M&Ms, and other Software Development Adventures
Jun 7, 2016 07 Jun 2016If you are going to incentivize certain behavior in your development team, make sure that you are checking regularly to make sure that you are not encouraging them to breed cobras
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Building Serverless Architecture with AWS Lambda, Snap CI and DynamoDB
May 30, 2016 30 May 2016Serverless architecture is a perfect solution for online ticketing sales provider, Applauze. See how it works with their large bursts of traffic.
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Hitchhiking to the DevOps Roadtrip
May 25, 2016 25 May 2016DevOps knowledge-sharing in Seattle on June 7
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WTF is Continuous Delivery?
May 24, 2016 24 May 2016A beginner’s guide to understanding continuous delivery
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From the Snap Support Team: Package Upgrades
May 17, 2016 17 May 2016Here are three easy troubleshooting tips for common problems on Snap
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Are Your Team Practices Accidentally Making Things Harder for Introverts?
May 10, 2016 10 May 2016Just because an activity is draining doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, you should just make sure it is the most effective use of your team’s energy.
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From the Snap Support Team: Troubleshooting in Snap with Sudo, Shell Scripts, and Bugs
May 5, 2016 05 May 2016Here are three easy troubleshooting tips for common problems on Snap CI
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Tuesdays at 10am: Serverless Architecture and Bursty Traffic
May 3, 2016 03 May 2016In our third post in a series on serverless architectures, we talk to long-time Snap CI customers Applauze about why they chose a serverless architecture to provide reliable, cost-efficient and stable architecture for their spiky, demand-driven traffic.
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Snap CI Is the Tool for All Cloud-Based Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Needs
Apr 28, 2016 28 Apr 2016Snap is the next evolution in continuous delivery & continuous integration software from ThoughtWorks, with built-in expertise and best practices from well-known technology leaders.
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Why Serverless Architecture Makes Sense for Live-Streaming Video
Apr 24, 2016 24 Apr 2016Although it’s still early days, serverless architecture can essentially evaporate architecture, freeing up administrators to deal with the inherent complexity of their domain rather than its framework.
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An Introduction to Serverless Architecture
Apr 19, 2016 19 Apr 2016Serverless architecture is another step on the virtualization journey
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WTF are Containers?
Apr 12, 2016 12 Apr 2016“Container” is such a vague word. It’s an even vaguer concept.
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[Press Release] ThoughtWorks' Snap CI and GoCD Showcase Innovation in Continuous Delivery at DevOpsDays
Apr 5, 2016 05 Apr 2016ThoughtWorks doesn’t just talk Continuous Delivery best practices: it supports them by creating powerful build-and-deploy tools and sponsoring forward-looking events like DevOpsDays
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Do you Devop? [Video]
Apr 4, 2016 04 Apr 2016Ever wonder how to DevOps? Here’s a video on how ThoughtWorks’ Snap CI and GoCD do it
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[Podcast] Scaling Agile & Continuous Delivery with Suzie Prince & Chad Wathington from ThoughtWorks
Mar 29, 2016 29 Mar 2016Discussion on being lean, scaling agile methodologies, scaling agile change management techniques for leadership, and best practices for adopting Continuous Delivery.
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Snap CI Digest - March 2016: Boaty McBoatface and the Internet Decision Machine
Mar 25, 2016 25 Mar 2016A collection of articles, how-to’s, and other interesting reads from the team members of ThoughtWork’s Snap CI
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How to get faster feedback now
Mar 22, 2016 22 Mar 2016How unit tests, continuous integration and continuous delivery with deployment pipeline help get feedback and get better
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5.5 reasons why Baremetrics is an awesome reporting tool for SaaS Product Managers
Mar 1, 2016 01 Mar 2016I’m going to tell you why Baremetrics is an awesome reporting tool for SaaS product managers
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Continuous Deployment of a Static Website to AWS with Snap CI
Feb 9, 2016 09 Feb 2016Here’s how you use Continuous Deployment to delivery a static website using AWS and Snap CI
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3 Key Deployment Pipeline Patterns
Jan 25, 2016 25 Jan 2016Teams have been automating the build, test and deploy processes of their software for many years, but usually in a very specific “one off” manner. This piece walks through 3 key patterns, among many, to setting up a successful deployment pipeline.
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Snap CI Digest - January 2016: Do you have an eBrain or a paper brain?
Jan 21, 2016 21 Jan 2016A collection of articles, how-to’s, and other interesting reads from the team members of ThoughtWork’s Snap CI
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Why we don't use estimates in our day-to-day
Jan 20, 2016 20 Jan 2016It’s difficult to find someone who would argue that we should estimate an entire software project without having written a single line of code for it.
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Immediately Debug a Failed Stage
Jan 12, 2016 12 Jan 2016Using the Snap Shell stage debug rerun feature allows you to debug directly in the browser without having to reconfigure and rerun an entire pipeline
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[eBook] Continuous Deployment Strategies - Techniques for Implementation
Jan 5, 2016 05 Jan 2016Download Snap’s free eBook on CD Strategies, containing techniques for Blue/Green Servers, Phoenix Servers and more
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Secure, Easy, and Visible: Why UK's Tramchester App Uses Snap
Dec 15, 2015 15 Dec 2015Tramchester UK used Snap CI to maintain and update their mobile web app which helps people navigate the Manchester tram network.
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[INFOGRAPHIC] What's the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment?
Dec 2, 2015 02 Dec 2015The difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment is quite simple, but something most people don’t understand. Here’s an easy way to remember.
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Architecting for Continuous Delivery
Nov 24, 2015 24 Nov 2015Continuous Delivery is not just about automating deployments. In this article, we talk about three recurring architectural challenges while enabling CD.
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Sharing Secrets with Teams
Nov 11, 2015 11 Nov 2015Understanding the problems about not encrypting secrets and discussing the solutions
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Who's got long pipelines?
Nov 9, 2015 09 Nov 2015The need of having multiple stages in your delivery pipeline caused some UI problems, solved by Snap CI’s new pipeline interface
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Playing with WebSockets for Fun and Profit: Debugging Remote Machines
Oct 28, 2015 28 Oct 2015The web has come far from the days of AJAX polling to where the browser constantly polled the server for updates. In general there are a few ways to get a message from a server to a browser, each of these has their benefits and drawbacks.
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Snap CI and GoCD at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015 Showcasing Innovation in Continuous Delivery
Oct 15, 2015 15 Oct 2015ThoughtWorks’ Continuous Delivery Products Snap CI and GoCD Come Together at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015 to Showcase Innovation in Continuous Delivery
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Enabling Trunk Based Development with Deployment Pipelines
Oct 6, 2015 06 Oct 2015Trunk based development is a leading indictor of high performance teams. In this article, we will talk about how TBD helps, best practices, and how to enable it with Deployment Pipelines.
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Fun with Snap CI API and IFTTT Do Button
Sep 30, 2015 30 Sep 2015With Snap APIs, you can have some fun trying out new things, including designing your own deployment buttons from your phone.
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Pull Request Workflow With Snap CI
Sep 22, 2015 22 Sep 2015Snap CI has had pull request integration with GitHub for quite some time now. In this article, we will discuss why this is an excellent collaboration mechanism
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Why we decided to use LXC instead of Docker for build environments in Snap
Sep 9, 2015 09 Sep 2015Security aspects around using containers for build environments led to our decision choosing the container technology for provisioning build environments in Snap CI
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How Canary Release Helped us Deliver a Rails Upgrade
Aug 18, 2015 18 Aug 2015A new approach at releasing deployments that would reduce risk and regain confidence
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Types of Container Technologies
Aug 12, 2015 12 Aug 2015Part 2 of the series on “Bringing Docker support on Snap CI”. In this article, we delve a little deeper into container technologies and the different types of containers.
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How Snap CI currently sets up build environments
Aug 5, 2015 05 Aug 2015Part 1 of our series on ‘Bringing Docker Support to Snap CI’. Here, we talk about how Snap CI currently provides build environments for user builds.
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Introducing Global Environment Variables
Jul 31, 2015 31 Jul 2015Quick intro of Snap’s global environment variables feature.
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Deployment Pipelines in Snap CI
Jul 23, 2015 23 Jul 2015In Snap CI, the deployment pipeline can be modeled as a series of custom build stages. Each stage consists of a set of commands which are run to accomplish a specific purpose.
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Implementation Techniques for Canary Releases
Jul 8, 2015 08 Jul 2015This article describes some of the implementation techniques for performing Canary Releases.
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Blue/Green Deployments
Jul 1, 2015 01 Jul 2015This Continuous Deployment Strategy article describes some of the implementation techniques for performing blue/green deployments.
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Continuous Deployment Strategies
Jun 22, 2015 22 Jun 2015Learn implementation techniques for various Continuous Deployment Strategies.
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Continuous Delivery is not a destination
Apr 14, 2015 14 Apr 2015Continuous Delivery is a journey, not a destination. Listen to Badri and Akshay discuss this topic from the Pipeline Conference.
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rbenv and nvm changes
Mar 18, 2015 18 Mar 2015Snap CI will use rbenv to install rubies on your build machines.
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Win $500 Writing About Snap or Mingle
Mar 17, 2015 17 Mar 2015Mingle and Snap are excited to announce they will award $500 prizes for the best blog posts on specific topics for AirPair’s developer writing competition.
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Meet a Snap developer: Fernando
Mar 16, 2015 16 Mar 2015Fernando Junior, a developer usually based in Recife, Brazil, but currently in Pune, India, tells us all about life on the Snap team.
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A more deliberately designed notification center
Feb 23, 2015 23 Feb 2015Access the notification center from the “build history” page, and the ability to specify exactly what aspects of your build you wish to be notified about.
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Faster builds with bigger sized workers
Feb 13, 2015 13 Feb 2015With Snap CI, you get to run your builds on workers as large as you might need.
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Warp speed, Scotty: Faster builds with multiple workers
Dec 19, 2014 19 Dec 2014Everybody loves faster feedback on their builds, including us. We would now like to announce to you the ability to run your build across multiple “workers”.
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OpenShift Deployments using Snap CI
Nov 25, 2014 25 Nov 2014Snap has built in support for several Platforms-as-a-Services(PAAS), yet it is surprisingly easy to add any provider that accepts git push deployments.
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A more shell-like environment to run your build
Nov 4, 2014 04 Nov 2014Snap’s stages currently provide an isolated environment around every command that you run in them.
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AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Revisited
Oct 17, 2014 17 Oct 2014You can now use Snap’s Elastic Beanstalk Deploy recipe. Have a look at the AWS getting started guide for steps on how to create a Beanstalk application.
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Deploying to OpsWorks in a Snap
Oct 15, 2014 15 Oct 2014AWS OpsWorks is a service that allows you to create and manage these resources collectively in a stack.
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Snap "ShellShock" Bash Bug Security Advisory
Sep 26, 2014 26 Sep 2014CVE-2014-6271, commonly known as the ShellShock bug with GNU bash was made. The fix for this was incomplete and a new vulnerability was identified.
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Building Clojure projects on Snap
Sep 23, 2014 23 Sep 2014Given how much we love the language, and how many people have asked us for it, we thought it best to document how to get your Clojure projects building on Snap.
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Pull request integration
Sep 12, 2014 12 Sep 2014When someone issues a pull-request, Snap will automatically set up a pipeline, attempt to merge the request into the upstream branch, and run the pipeline.
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Introducing the Snap Shell
Aug 11, 2014 11 Aug 2014Snap offers you the ability to diagnose a build, and making it a lot more straightforward. Just type `snap-shell` as a command in your pipeline configuration.
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Why Snap-(CI) and Travis-(CI) are not the same thing.
Jul 22, 2014 22 Jul 2014What is the difference between Snap CI and other continuous delivery tools?
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Releasing Ruby gems from your CI environment
Apr 17, 2014 17 Apr 2014Releasing every change you make to rubygems.org is likely not the best way to release usable chunks of functionality to your users.
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Snap "Heartbleed" Security Advisory
Apr 10, 2014 10 Apr 2014The various partners that Snap works with (Amazon AWS, Heroku, Github etc) have taken steps to contain the impact of the Heartbleed vulnerability.
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Rails development with service fakes
Nov 18, 2013 18 Nov 2013For this blog post, we wanted to show how we swap out the real S3 tool for something that works better for local development.
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Automatic branch tracking & integration pipelines
Nov 7, 2013 07 Nov 2013There are well known patterns to using branches, in a disciplined manner, despite having their fair share of problems.
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Deploying to AWS using Elastic Beanstalk
Oct 21, 2013 21 Oct 2013Snap now has the AWS CLI installed on all build boxes, allowing you to perform a number of AWS operations including deploying to AWS using Elastic Beanstalk
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Hack a Scala/Play build on Snap CI
Oct 1, 2013 01 Oct 2013In this post, I will talk about how to set up a build for simple Scala/Play project on Snap CI.
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Building a Dropwizard project
Sep 18, 2013 18 Sep 2013This blog post describes how to use Snap to deploy your Dropwizard services to Heroku with deployment pipelines.
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Simplify setting up Heroku deployments with OAuth
Sep 13, 2013 13 Sep 2013Using Heroku OAuth makes Snap a single point of contact for deploying your code to an existing app on Heroku or even creating a new app for deployments.
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Announcing support for NoSQL datastores!
Sep 12, 2013 12 Sep 2013We’re excited to announce that we’re adding support for 3 of the most requested NoSQL datastores; CouchDB, MongoDB and Redis generally available for all builds.
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CI does include deploying to production
Aug 6, 2013 06 Aug 2013At Snap, we believe that any Continuous Integration tool, hosted or not, should treat deployments as a first class member of the Continuous Integration process.
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Would you like a side of build with that branch?
Mar 18, 2013 18 Mar 2013Snap CI can clone an existing build pipeline, but point it at a different source tree/branch. Within minutes, your new patch can be tested, integrated and pushed out to production
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Beyond Staging
Feb 21, 2013 21 Feb 2013A working build pipeline means that you are guaranteed that the exact same set of git commits that trigger a stage also trigger the following ones.
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Enter Snap...
Nov 27, 2012 27 Nov 2012I believe that the ability to reliably release your application, early & often, with a degree of quality, is an essential aspect of development discipline.
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Setting up a CI server is sooo 2011
Oct 25, 2012 25 Oct 2012Isn’t it time your CI tool learnt about those conventions and decided to do the provisioning of the machine?
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