One of the most common requests we've heard since releasing our book, High Performance Django is: "Do you have more code/configuration examples?" It's a pretty loaded question because the book covers everything from Python code to deploying and configuring servers. After some thinking on how to deliver this in a format people could easily understand, I realized the answer was already right under our noses.

We've been users of Salt for configuration management for almost three years. Over the last few weeks I've been extracting our internal Salt states into a reusable and extensible system I like to call "infrastructure-in-a-box". It encompasses all the lessons we've learned over the years with our different clients and allows anyone to setup a complete Python website (load balancer, web accelerator, cache, database, task queue, etc.) in about 15 minutes. The exact same code can be used to setup a single Vagrant machine on your laptop or a ten server farm in the cloud. I whipped together a quick screencast preview of it in action (apologies for the low-quality audio):

I'm really excited about being able to offer this as a companion product to our book. It's going to save people a lot of time and money (not to mention heartache) figuring it out on their own.

Here's the thing though, I need your feedback to get this released. I know this would have been useful for us and for many of our clients, but there's a lot of work left to take it from where it is to a polished product. Is this something that interests you? What topics would you like to see included? Leave a comment or send us an email with your thoughts. Thanks!