Read the original article at Scalability Rules for managers and startups

Abbott and Fisher’s previous book, The Art of Scalability received good reviews for shifting the way we think about scalability from merely splitting databases and adding servers, to include the human factors that weigh heavily on its success. Together with the authors’ distinguished pedigree (PayPal, Amazon, and eBay between them), I picked up a copy of their second book, Scalability Rules - 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites without a second thought.

If Art was about laying a strong foundation for a scalable organization then Rules is the …

Read the original article at How to hire a developer that doesn’t suck

Strip by Randall Munroe; xkcd.com

First things first. This is not meant to be a beef against developers. But let’s not ignore the elephant in the living room that is the divide between brilliant code writers and the risk averse operations team.

It is almost by default that developers are disruptive with their creative coding while the guys in operations, those who deploy the code, constantly cross their fingers in the hope that application changes won’t tilt the machine. And when you’re woken up at 4am to deal with an outage or your sluggish site is costing millions in losses, the blame game and finger-pointing starts.

If you manage a startup …

Topics for this podcast:

*Continuent extends MySQL replication to Oracle Database
*CFEngine updates server automation software
*Devops moving mainstream
*Neo Technology integrates with Spring
*451 CAOS report from Hadoop World

iTunes or direct download (26:56, 4.6MB)

Recently at Surge 2011, the annual  conference on scalability  and performance, Google's CIO Ben Fried gave an illuminating keynote address. His main insight was that generalists are the people that will lead engineering teams in successfully scaling the web.

In a world where the badge of Specialist or Expert is prized, this was refreshing perspective from an industry bigwig. As tech professionals, or any professional for that matter, we don't welcome the label of generalist. The word suggests a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. But the generalist is no less an expert than the specialist. Generalists can get their hands greasy with the tools to fix bugs in the machine but they are especially good at mobilizing the …

Topics for this podcast:

*Cloud M&A potential around OpenStack
*Oracle’s commercial extensions for MySQL
*Puppet Labs rolls out Enterprise 2.0, hosts PuppetConf
*Basho bolsters Riak distributed data store in NoSQL race
*Our latest special CAOS report, ‘The Changing Linux Landscape’

iTunes or direct download (25:59, 4.4MB)

It’s been some time now that we’ve been talking about devops, the pushing together of application development and application deployment via IT operations, in the enterprise. To keep up to speed on the trend, 451 CAOS attended PuppetConf, a conference for the Puppet Labs community of IT administrators, developers and industry leaders around the open source Puppet server configuration and automation software. One thing that seems clear, given the talk about agile development and operations, cloud computing, business and culture, our definition of devops continues to be accurate.

Another consistent part of devops that also emerged at PuppetConf last week was the way it tends to introduce additional stakeholders beyond software developers and IT …

I often run my ops like I take care of data; a bit overzealously. Case in point, when setting up a new database, I like to throw on a metric for database size, which gets turned into both a graph for trending, but also an alert on database size. Everyone is always on board with trending database size in a graph, but the alert is one people tend to question. This is not entirely without justification.

On a new database, with no data or activity, deciding when to alert is pretty fuzzy. When we set up a new client within our managed hosting service, I usually just toss up an arbitrary number, like 2GB or something. The idea isn't that a 2GB database is a problem, it's that when we cross 2GB, we should probably take a look at the trending graph and do a projection. Depending on how things look, we'll bump up the threshold on the alert to a new …

Amazon EC2 and cloud computing offer great promise for startups to ramp up their online presence quickly.  Navigate those challenges with an strong partner.  We bring 20 years experience to the table with each new client.

• Scaling Web Applications
• MySQL High Availability in Amazon EC2
• Amazon Multi-AZ Deployments
• Amazon RDS Deployments
• Migrating to Amazon EC2
• Migrating to MySQL
• Managing Backups and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
• Horizontal Scalability of MySQL on EC2
• Horizontal Scalability on Cloud Hosted Servers
• Evaluating Cloud Providers
• Evaluating MySQL Distributions and Platforms
• Strong Customer Facing Skills
• Integrate Directly with Development Team
• Agile …

I find myself flying to New York on Monday for some dealnews related business. Anytime I travel I try and find something fun to do at night. (Watching a movie by myself in Provo, Utah was kinda not that fun.) So, this week I asked on Twitter if anything was happening while I would be in town. Anything would do. A meetup of PHP/MySQL users or some design/css/js related stuff for example. Pretty much anything interesting. Well, later that day I received an IM from the brilliant John Allspaw, Senior VP of Technical Operations at Etsy. He wanted me to swing by the Etsy offices and say hi. Turns out it is only a block away from where I would be. Awesome! He also mentioned that he would like to have me come and speak at their offices some time. That would be neat too. I will have to plan better …

I was testing some MySQL puppet modules on my Vagrant box earlier this week and one of them required augeas.
I kept running into "Could not find a default provider for augeas", however all the appropriate augeas , augeas-lib and ruby-augeas packages were installed. I inspected the different ruby directories and the files were perfectly in /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8 where I expected them.

With all the files seemd to be in the right place, my next option was to strace a small ruby script that included augeas, guess what that showed ..

1. stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/augeas.rb", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
2. stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/augeas.so", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
3. stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/i686-linux/augeas.rb", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
4. …