I have spent a few days now playing with CoreOS and helping other members of HP's Advanced Technology Group get it running on their setups.
Today I thought I would write about the good and the bad about CoreOS so far.  Many components are in an alpha or beta state so things may change over the coming months.  Also as a disclaimer, views in this post are my own and not necessarily those of HP.
Installation
As stated in my blog post yesterday, I have been using CoreOS on my Macbook Pro using Vagrant and VirtualBox.  This made it extremely easy to setup the CoreOS cluster on my Mac.  I made a minor mistake to start with, and that is to not configure the unique URL required for Etcd correctly.  A mistake a colleague of mine also made on his first try so it likely to be a common one to make.
I initially …

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ICTexpo Helsinki 2014 offers two effective days full of innovations, inspiration and information - the biggest professional IT show in the Nordics with large scale of solutions to help you to take your business to the next level. Continuent will be exhibiting in Red Hat Village [booth 5f31], which gathers the most significant enterprise level companies from the Open Source ecosystem in Finland

A potential customer asked my about porting her application from Oracle Database to MySQL.

I always try to start with the "why" (a dear friend bought me this book, recommended: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447).

She said "cloud!". I said "OK!".

I conducted a short research, found many things in many places all over the place, brought them to a nice email I sent her back and then thought I'll post it here and make it public as it might be useful for us all. If you feel that I missed something, add comments, send feedback.

These are the leading tools to do the actual migration of the data structure, data export/import, sprocs, triggers, etc.:

1. MySQL Workbench has a migration feature: http://www.mysql.com/products/workbench/migrate/
2. MySQLYog can be used to migrate: …

MySQL's architecture and features make the database a great fit for cloud based deployments. If you are interested in using MySQL to deliver web-based applications and scale out, read the white paper MySQL, An Ideal Choice in the Cloud.

As a first step to using the MySQL database, take the MySQL for Beginners course. In this 4-day course, you learn to use the MySQL Server and tools while developing a knowledge of relational databases. You can take this course through the following delivery methods:

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I have recently moved to HP's Advanced Technology Group which is a new group in HP and as part of that I will be blogging a lot more about the Open Source things I and others in HP work on day to day.  I thought I would kick this off by talking about work that a colleague of mine, Patrick Crews, worked on several months ago.

For those who don't know Patrick, he is a great Devops Engineer and QA.  He will find new automated ways of breaking things that will torture applications (and the Engineers who write them). I don't know if I am proud or ashamed to say he has found many bugs in code that I have written by doing the software equivalent of beating it with a sledgehammer.

Every Devops Engineer worth his salt knows that backups are important, but one thing that is regularly forgotten about is to check whether the backups are good.  A colleague of mine …

Benchmarking, and benchmarking the cloud, is incredibly error prone. I provided guidance though this minefield in the benchmarking chapter of my book (Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud); that chapter can be read online on the InformIT site. I also gave a lightning talk about benchmarking gone wrong at Surge last year. In this post, I’m going to cut to the chase and show you the tools I commonly use for basic cloud benchmarking.

As explained in the benchmarking chapter, I do not run these tools passively. I perform Active Benchmarking, where I use a …

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Marketo provides the leading cloud-based marketing software platform for companies of all sizes to build and sustain engaging customer relationships. Marketo's SaaS platform runs on MySQL and has faced data management challenges common to all 24x7 SaaS businesses:

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“The most valuable thing I’ve learned in this role is that judicious use of a little bit of knowledge can go a long way. I’ve seen colleagues and other companies get caught up in the “Big Data” craze by spend hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling on a Hadoop cluster that sees a few megabytes [...]