Background on Backup Locks

I was very excited to see Backup locks support in release notes for the latest Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.21 release. For those who are not aware, backup locks offer an alternative to FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK (FTWRL) in Xtrabackup. While Xtrabackup can hot-copy Innodb, everything else in MySQL must be locked (usually briefly) to get a consistent snapshot that lines up with Innodb. This includes all other storage engines, but also things like table schemas (even on Innodb) and async replication binary logs. You can skip this lock, but it isn’t …

I visited MongoDB Day in London on November 6. Here are a few observations:

App-Developer Centric. It is interesting to see how much MongoDB is about developers; the ops side is something which is a necessary evil developers have to deal with. The ops topics covered in principle that there are no topics about choices of operating systems or hardware for MongoDB beyond flash and more memory.

Development Stacks. Being application centric there was good coverage of the MongoDB-powered stacks – MEAN and METEOR specifically got attention. Especially the METEOR presentation by Henrik Ingo was cool – real-time view synchronization between the Web browser (or mobile app) and database as well as the same language for server-side and client-side development is a really great concept. Though …

MySQL database usage is popular in OpenStack. Core OpenStack services for Compute (Nova), Storage (Cinder), Neutron (Networking), Image (Glance) and Identity (Keystone) all use MySQL database.

MySQL – as the world’s most popular database, runs inside OpenStack Virtual Machines and serves as database backend to OpenStack cloud based applications. The MySQL instances can be configured to run in virtual machines manually (by simply installing MySQL inside a VM and running it) or can be created in an on-demand fashion by OpenStack Database-as-a-Service (Trove).

In either case, the MySQL data is mission-critical. OpenStack cloud administrators and cloud guests/tenants need the ability to backup and restore their MySQL databases. mysqldump is traditional way of doing MySQL backups and restores. However, based on previous experiences of the MySQL community, it is widely known that mysqldump has …

In Part 1 we started our study of Amazon Services and looked at Amazon EC2. In this part, we will look at other Amazon services like EMR, DynamoDB and RDS.

1. 1.      Amazon Elastic Map Reduce

Amazon EMR is a web service which makes cloud computing very easy. Amazon’s EMR cluster comes preconfigured with Hadoop, which as mentioned earlier is a data processing and storage framework. This preconfiguration makes it very easy to start analysing your data in no time. Amazon EMR has applications in machine learning, financial analysis, bioinformatics etc.

Just like EC2, you can launch any number of EMR instances as you need and you will only be charged for the computing power you have used. EMR is preconfigured …

A fascinating post-mortem on high profile network failures:

This post is meant as a reference point–to illustrate that, according to a wide range of accounts, partitions occur in many real-world environments. Processes, servers, NICs, switches, local and wide area networks can all fail, and the resulting economic consequences are real. Network outages can suddenly arise in systems that are stable for months at a time, during routine upgrades, or as a result of emergency maintenance. The consequences of these outages range from increased latency and temporary unavailability to inconsistency, corruption, and data loss. Split-brain is not an academic concern: it happens to all kinds of systems–sometimes for days on end. Partitions deserve serious consideration.

The Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013 was April 22-25 in Santa Clara, California. This was Percona’s second year organizing the conference and we were very pleased with the event and the feedback (check the #perconalive hashtag for a sampling of the great comments such as this from Tom Krouper or this from John Goulah or this from Jeremy Tinley or this from SF MySQL Meetup).

There are so many people involved with putting on this event that it’s impossible to list them all. The conference would be …

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo begins next Monday and runs April 22-25, 2013. Attendees will see great keynotes from leaders in the industry including representatives from Oracle, Amazon Web Services, HP, Continuent, and Percona. They can also participate in thought provoking Birds of a Feather sessions on Tuesday night and the Wednesday night Community Networking Reception will be fun and entertaining with the presentation of the Community Awards and the Lightning Talks.

If you cannot attend the entire Percona Live MySQL Conference but want to take advantage of the keynotes, BOFs, and Community Networking …

This tutorial will help you register and get ready to use Amazon Web Service (AWS). AWS provides a free tier so it is possible to use these services at ZERO cost.

These instructions are used by the Effective MySQL: Backup and Recovery book examples.

Step 1: Registration

1. Goto AWS site
2. Register email address
3. Enter Login Credentials
4. Enter Contact Information
5. Enter Credit Card details (while this is required, provided you follow free guidelines you will not be charged)
6. Identity verification by Telephone
7. Activation of account

Screenshots
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We’ve seen the rise of open source software in the enterprise and also beyond the IT industry, but the real keys to openness and its advantages in today’s technology world — where efficient use of cloud computing and supporting services are paramount — exist in open application programming interfaces, or APIs.

Open source software continues to be a critical part of software development, systems administration, IT operations and more, but much of the action in leveraging modern cloud computing and services-based infrastructures centers on APIs. Open APIs are the new open source.

Read the full story at LinuxInsider.

Read the original article at The market for Cloud Computing

Saw this awesome infographic by Cloud Spectator on twitter today. A great snapshot of the expected growth in Cloud Computing. If the Cloud Computing market was stacked up against world economies it would be the 51st largest in the world with massive inequality - Amazon has half the share.

For more articles like these go to MySQL Expert, Linux, EC2 & Scalability Consulting NYC