Using Review Board with Amazon CodeCommit

July 9, 2015December 16, 2015 Christian Hammond

Today, Amazon released their all-new CodeCommit service as part of the Amazon Web Services family. CodeCommit is a Git repository hosting service built for scalability and reliability, helping to securely store encrypted versions of your code, binaries, and configuration related to your products and cloud infrastructure.

They’ve put together a guide on integrating AWS CodeCommit with Review Board that you can follow if you’re wanting to give this service a try. It’ll walk you through deploying a Review Board server, setting up access to CodeCommit, linking your repository, and posting changes for review.

Currently, setup requires maintaining an in-sync clone of your repository on the Review Board server. We’re aiming to work with the CodeCommit team to help bring direct support for hosted CodeCommit repositories to a future release of Review Board and RBCommons.

For more information on getting set up, check out the CodeCommit page and read our guides on configuring Git repositories and our recommended RBTools workflows for Git.

This weekend’s upcoming server maintenance

August 16, 2014December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

This weekend, we’re beginning a series of upgrades to our infrastructure that should resolve some stability issues we’ve periodically hit with our database server on AWS. It should also help to improve performance across the site.

This work will start Sunday, August 17th at 6AM UTC (that’s Saturday at 11PM PST for those in California). We’re blocking off two hours for the work, at which point the site will be down. It shouldn’t take nearly that long, though.

Going forward, we’re gearing up for a big update to RBCommons. Along with this, we’re planning some further hardware upgrades that should do a lot to further improve performance. We’re planning this for some time in the next two weeks. We’ll announce the details when we’re closer.

If you are worried that your team is going to be horribly impacted by this maintenance window, please let us know!

Updated Sunday, 12:33AM PST: Maintenance is complete, and we’re back up and running!

Bitten by downtime – Here’s what’s next

October 22, 2012December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

Updated 4:18PM: We came back up just over an hour ago, but were not totally reliable, as Amazon’s services were still under maintenance. Things seem to have now stabilized, and you should be able to use RBCommons reliably again.

A few minutes ago, we were alerted to the fact that RBCommons is down. We host on Amazon, and it seems the file storage backend we use is temporarily down, which they’re looking into. On the one-hand, it means they’re on it, and we should be back up soon. On the other, it means everyone is down right now.

This, of course, sucks.

I expect we’ll be back up pretty soon. In the meantime, here’s what we’re going to do to make this less of a problem in the future.

We’ve been preparing this past week on enhancing Review Board and RBCommons so that we can more easily scale out across more of what Amazon calls “availability zones.” We’re close, and when we’re done, we’ll be spreading out our services and adding some more redundancy so this won’t bite us again.

We’re also going to work to become less reliant on EBS, so that if it goes down again, it won’t impact us, or you.

If you were impacted by this today, e-mail us and let us know. We’ll work to make you happy.