Recently, Dave Graham and Todd Geist led a webinar about Otto, our Dev Opps tool for FileMaker. Watch the video here:
What is Otto?
Todd kicked off the meeting by describing what Developer Ops means. DevOps (as we call it) is anything that will help automate the processes you have to go through when you have to manage a FileMaker Server and FileMaker Applications.
Otto is easy to install on your FileMaker server machines.. And once on the machines, Otto provides many features for the developer:
- Automated Data Migration
- Proxy – API keys
- Config settings that
- a Developer API
These features and processes are available via your favorite browser. There are some caveats with installing Otto on server machines, and Todd clearly lays those out.
Data migration
In the webinar, Dave demonstrated how to perform quick data migrations using Otto Migrator. He showed how the developer tool does all the work for you when it comes to:
- Pausing a file on the dev server.
- Moving a clone of the dev file from the dev server to another server (in this case the production server).
- Migrating the data from the old production to the clone.
- Removing the old production file
- Replacing the old production file with the new production file (the clone)
- Opening the files on both the development and production servers.
He showed how easy it was to set up the routine to happen at the moment or scheduled for a later time.
Otto Migrator is a great way to reduce all the work that used to take hours into minutes. With Otto Migrator, you don’t need to plan an entire weekend for file transfer and data migration. It is all done while you get that last cup of coffee at the end of the development cycle when a file is ready to be sent to staging.
Todd then continued the webinar by going over the remaining features. Here are the highlights.
Proxy & API Keys
We have wrapped the FileMaker data api in a proxy, allowing us to add Api keys and allows us to connect directly to browsers from anywhere.
Config Settings
Many of the FileMaker Server config settings were removed from the Admin Console, putting them into the command line or the dapi. Otto makes those settings available again. Otto provides a rich, interactive user interface that shows your files’ status, your backups, and even allows you to download any backup.
Built in help
Otto has our documentation built in. There’s also a chat mechanism. Chat with Todd or Dave if there’s an issue and get help immediately!
Put it on your calendar
Todd showed off how a developer can add each schedule and completed migration to your Outlook or Google calendar. The task gives you a lot of details including whether it was successful or not and provides a link to the actual migration log in Otto.
Questions
The session ended with a standard Q & A session. Many of the participants asked great questions, and Todd and Dave took the time to answer.
Check out the webinar, and download Otto to try out yourself.