Read the original article at AirBNB didn’t have to fail

Today part of Amazon Web Services failed, taking down with it a slew of startups that all run on Amazon’s Cloud infrastructure. AirBNB was one of the biggest, but also Heroku, Reddit, Minecraft, Flipboard & Coursera down with it. Its not the first time. What the heck happened, and why should we care?

1. Root Cause

The AWS service allows companies like AirBNB to build web applications, and host them on servers owned and managed by Amazon. The so-called raw iron of this army of compute power sits in datacenters. Each datacenter is …

Read the original article at Why do people leave consulting?

As a long time freelancer, it’s a question that’s intrigued me for some time. I do have some theories… First, definitions… I’m not talking about working for a large consulting firm. Although this role may be called “consultant”, my meaning is consultant as sole proprietor, entrepreneur, gun for hire or lone wolf. 1. Make more [...]

For more articles like these go to Sean Hull's Scalable Startups

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1. Consulting essentials: Getting the business
2. Hiring is …

Read the original article at Anatomy of a Performance Review

A lot of firms come to us with a specific scalability problem. “Our user base is growing rapidly and the website is falling over!” Or they’re selling more widgets, “Our shopping cart is slowing down and we’re seeing users abandon their purchases”. These are real startup growing pains, so what to do?

We like to take a measured approach with these types of challenges, so we thought it would be helpful to run through a hypothetical scenario and see how we work.

Having trouble with scalability? Check out our 5 things toxic to scalability piece. …

Read the original article at Hiring is a numbers game

On a recent twitter chat (#hfchat) I posted some comments about hiring. Some folks were complaining that they had applied to various jobs, and not heard back.

I commented…

Apply for a job and don’t hear back, it’s nothing personal

In today’s market, there are hundreds of job applicants for every position. Sad to say, but that means things become a blur after a while. There’s less chance to sift each candidate and find out who they really are or what they really know. It’s more about keywords, and buzzwords if you must, to get your foot in the door.

But there is a flip side to this coin, which I think many job seekers forget …

Read the original article at Why you should attend Percona Live 2012

What I loved about Percona Live 2011 Last year I was excited to go to Percona Live for the first time in NYC. I arrived just in time to hear Harrison Fisk from Facebook speak about some of the awesome tweaks they’re running with MySQL there. It’s not everyday that you get to hear from [...]

For more articles like these go to Sean Hull's Scalable Startups

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Read the original article at Upcoming for Scalable Startups

Just back from the Labor Day holiday, and ready to dive back in.

I thought this would be a great time to outline some of our upcoming topics so here goes…

1. Why Oracle usability sucks

- a rant about Oracle’s weak points

In the meantime take a peek at our piece on why we wrote the book on Oracle & Open Source. We ruminate on trends in the datacenter and take a stab at Oracle’s future.

2. Why relational databases don’t scale

- Is there any such thing as automatic scalability?
- What blocks scalability?
- Are NoSQL databases magic?

Also one of our articles that went viral – …

Read the original article at 31 Essential Blogs for Startups & Scalability

So many blogs, so little time! Here’s our list of the best we’ve found. Currently our favorite reader is Pulse pictured left. Starting to play around with flipboard too.

Nuts & Bolts Technical

Slashdot
One of the original tech blogs, that still covers lots of breaking news, and difficult topics. Very technical, with probing commentary. Beware the actual comments though, as they’re often full of immature and childish rants.

Planet …

Read the original article at Opportunity a day – career risk at bay

Free Agent. Stress Test. Avoid Sameness

As the globalization juggernaut rolls on, it continues to create more Detroits. Skills and perspectives quickly become obsolete.

What to do in the face of such change?

Small fires prevent the big burn

So there’s your quick answer. Get the book if you want more!

Some related material: why is it so hard to find a mysql dba?.
Consulting 101 Guide – Finding …

Read the original article at Sometimes… let things break a little

Have you ever started a new project, just into it you realize that maybe there aren’t technical problems to solve? It starts to dawn on you the real crux of the problem boils down to people & processes?

It’s happened to me on a number of occasions, but once in particular really stands out for me.

I was working for a firm in the education space, in particular around test preparations.

Asked to automate a publish process

The environment had a mix of relational databases, from SQL*Server to MySQL for some applications. The web facing database however used Oracle on the backend.

Their career DBA was real old guard Oracle, he had …

Read the original article at Where’s my 80 million dollars?

Way back in the heydays of the dot-com boom, the year is 1999.

I worked for a medium size internet startup called Method Five. When I came on board they were having a terrible time with their site performance.

Website crashing

When I first met the team, I was tasked with performance problems. After all their flagship web property kept crashing, and it didn’t look good to investors. As with most web properties in those days it was a home-grown datacenter in the back of the office, running on Sun Microsystems hardware, with Oracle on the backend and Apache serving webpages.

Negotiating an acquisition

As it …