Automated testing and deployment is exquisitely supported by cloud infrastructures that have fast provisioning and de-provisioning capabilities.  Our friends at Strider (Brilliant Continuous Delivery) are working on some great tools to do enforce the discipline for just that.   Stephen and Niall regularly assemble wisdom for Node.js and Python Test Driver Development (TDD) at their Beyond Fog blog.  Their latest entry on Node.js TDD outlines how they use should.js, Zombie, Mocha, and Sinon with Heroku and MongoLab to catch bugs and design misconceptions early and often.

Cloud infrastructures let development teams easily stand up test and pre-production stacks with minimal friction, like at Hipster.  That minimizes deployment risk and keeps minds focused on developing less on debugging.

Go visit Strider, get a private beta invite, and slay bugs early!

Nothing makes us more excited and happy than to hear about the wild success of our customers. We’ve been honored to be a critical component to many businesses from the smallest to the biggest. One that I want to highlight here is hipster.com.

We’ve posted a success story that describes CTO Ethan Czahor’s experience with MongoLab, including an outline of how he used the various plans we have to create development, staging, and production instances. Hipster also used heroku.com to manage their application tier for a worry-free infrastructure. With MongoLab handling operations and 10gen‘s database affording schemaless NoSQL flexibility, the engineering team could focus on the app and website.

Hipster was covered in the New York Times and the app was featured on the iTunes AppStore. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of entrepreneurs. Completely unprompted, Ethan was kind enough to thank our support team for going “above and beyond”. We’re humbled by the recognition, and delighted to be a part of Hipster’s story. Thanks and best wishes to Ethan and all the photo hipsters out there.

Please check out the success story and their beautiful infinite photo page.

MongoLab will be presenting, answering questions at the Joyent meetup Feb 29, 2012 in San Francisco.  Our CTO Todd Dampier and 10gen’s Jared Rosoff will be presenting.  Topics will be on running MongoDB in the Joyent Cloud and on SmartMachines.

Details and RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/Joyent-Cloud-User-Group/events/52241882/

One Embarcadero Center (Battery and Sacramento) , San Francisco, CA (map)

6pm start.

Thanks to the Joyent folks for hosting us (includes munchies and drinks)!