Making "Push On Green" a Reality
;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution
For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.
Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.
As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.
Updating production software is a process that may require dozens, if not hundreds, of steps. These include creating and testing new code, building new binaries and packages, associating the packages with a versioned release, updating the jobs in production datacenters, possibly modifying database schemata, and testing and verifying the results. There are boxes to check and approvals to seek, and the more automated the process, the easier it becomes. When releases can be made faster, it is possible to release more often, and, organizationally, one becomes less afraid to “release early, release often". And that’s what we describe in this article—making rollouts as easy and as automated as possible. When a “green” condition is detected, we can more quickly perform a new rollout. Humans are still needed somewhere in the loop, but we strive to reduce the purely mechanical toil they need to perform.
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