Fugue

Fugue's new Composer maps your application’s cloud infrastructure with automated, interactive diagrams that show your whole system in real time and the relationships between system components. You can zoom and inspect. You can quickly discover configuration errors and compliance violations. It's introduced with Fugue’s Transcriber—your tool to scan existing AWS cloud services in an account and automate their translation for easy Composer mapping. It doesn’t matter how you stood those services up. You'll see everything with Fugue. The new features are in beta and they're free.

Fugue reduces the cloud's new kinds of undifferentiated heavy lifting—the generic, often complex cloud work every business has to contend with—in a single system that delivers control, visibility, and speed for application governance. Reducing the lift is baked into every part of Fugue, including the first step, installation. With Fugue, no preliminary, extra layers of infrastructure creation, care, and feeding are required to get started. One command bootstraps everything!

As a follow up to Python Mocking 101: Fake It Before You Make It, this post covers some higher-level software engineering principles demonstrated in our Python testing over the past year and half. In particular, the idea of patching mock objects in unit tests is revisited and explored in greater depth.

Fugue now supports the Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud region, which means federal agencies, like enterprises, can automate operations in the cloud fast, while simultaneously meeting regulatory demands. Fugue deployments start with powerful, but easy-to-understand code declarations in a composition that governs a system’s infrastructure. By including select libraries in that composition with simple import statements, a particular agency’s compliance regime gets integrated from the start. This kind of fully realized policy-as-code provides a scalable protocol for agency cloud ops and increases speed to mission.

Whether businesses are using cloud providers, on-premise data centers, or hybrid setups to host web services and backends, infrastructure failures are a fact of life. They have to be on our radars as a matter of routine. This makes architecting for failure and for the future, from the start, among the most pressing imperatives for business IT departments. The next five years will see the rise and democratization of centralized control systems for cloud ops with fault tolerance architected into the very fabric of those systems. (This article was first published in DZone's Cloud Zone on April 3, 2017.)

When your metrics report that a Python component is experiencing random restarts and instability after a few days of uptime, what do you do? In our case, looking at memory usage showed that a component's memory footprint increased monotonically and continuously, indicating a memory leak. A powerful memory tracking tool in the Python standard library, tracemalloc, made it possible to diagnose and fix the leak quickly. In this post, we'll look at how we used it.

For Fugue, providing documentation is about more than just creating a high-level reference for information. Our documentation content ranges from examples of creating complex infrastructure with Fugue to walkthroughs of integration with a number of popular devops tools in use today. Which is what we’re here to talk to you about.

The story of Fugue software is a story about solving your real-world, everyday deployment and operations problems. The Pragmatic Bookshelf has just released Scalable Cloud Ops with Fugue, available now as a beta eBook and soon in paperback. With it, you’ll learn to build, operate, and enforce an evolving application's infrastructure with hands-on tutorials—ultimately running fourteen AWS cloud services in a model that affords low-latency global scaling. And, that's just the start ...

We’re a couple of weeks out of re:Invent and its dizzying buzz—the slew of service and feature announcements, the industry tracks and community meetings, the Mini Cons, the integration and how-to session deep dives, the intensive networking, the mall of sponsors with every manner of product presentation … even festive bling from the ever-present registration DJ. We’ve had some time to digest it all and think about a few of the more compelling offerings. Let’s zero in on a handful of this year's provocative developments.

Harry Weller, General Partner leading NEA’s east coast venture practice, passed away unexpectedly on November 19, 2016. We reflect on his powerful presence in our lives. He looked into this world and bypassed the routine—working fiercely, shaping vivid insights, sharing a smart magic, driving others forward emphatically and lifting them up generously. He knew that noise was just noise and broke past it. He had the rare wisdom that an explorer finds and shares. Our profound sympathy and love go out to Harry’s family and friends.