Join 27,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. I was shocked to find this article on ReadWrite: The Truth About DevOps: IT Isn’t Dead; It’s not even Dying. Wait a second, do people really think this? Truth is I have heard whispers of this before. I was at a meetup recently where the […]

Another post on Ansible over on the codecentric blog: Jinja2 for better Ansible playbooks and templates linked here for your convenience :)

August 25, 2014 By Severalnines

Are you going in production with Galera Cluster for MySQL? Here are 9 tips to consider before going live. These are applicable to all 3 Galera versions (Codership, Percona XtraDB Cluster and MariaDB Galera Cluster). 

1. Galera strengths and weaknesses

There are multiple types of replication and cluster technologies for MySQL, make sure you understand how Galera works so you set the right expectations. Applications that run on single instance MySQL might not work well on Galera, you might need to make some changes to the application or the workload might not be appropriate. We’d suggest you have a look at these resources: 

• Tutorial on …

August 12, 2014 By Severalnines

Moodle is an open-source e-learning platform (aka Learning Management System) that is widely adopted by educational institutions to create and administer online courses. For larger student bodies and higher volumes of instruction, moodle must be robust enough to serve thousands of learners, administrators, content builders and instructors simultaneously. Availability and scalability are key requirements as moodle becomes a critical application for course providers. In this blog, we will show you how to deploy and cluster moodle/web, database and file-system components on multiple servers to achieve both high availability and scalability. 

We are going to deploy moodle on top of GlusterFS clustered file system and MariaDB Galera Cluster 10. To eliminate any single point of failure, we will use three nodes to serve the application and database while the remaining two are used for …

Call for papers for Percona Live London 2014 is open. For the fourth consecutive year, PLUK is going to be one of the best community event in Europe.
I have the honour of being conference committee chairman and the hard task to reviewing the talks with my colleagues of the committee.

First, let me introduce the committee members:

• Art van Scheppingen (Spil Games)
• Nicolai Plum (Booking.com)
• Luis Motta Campos (Ebay Classifieds Group)
• Colin Charles (MariaDB)
• David Busby (Percona)
• Morgan Tocker (Oracle)
• Cédric PEINTRE (Dailymotion)

Amazing, isn’t it?! I think we couldn’t have a better committee for a community event.
I’m very glad to take part in the adventure with you guys!

And if you wonder what the committee does, …

On the company blog I published a post about our experience with Ansible today.

It is no shoot out between different automation tools, but rather a collection of Ansible basics and our experience with it so far. Soon another post will follow about dynamically generated inventories for OpenStack virtual environments.

You can find it here: codecentric blog: Ansible: Simple, yet powerful automation.

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 …

As a leader of a technical operations team I often have to work on technical operations engineer hiring. This process involves a lot of interviews with candidates and during those interviews along with many challenging practical questions I really love to ask questions like “What are the most important resources you think an Operations Engineer should follow?”, “What books in your opinion are must-read for a techops engineer?” or “Who are your personal heroes in IT community?”. Those questions often give me a lot of information about candidates, their experience, who they are looking up to in the community, what they are interested in, and if they are actively working on improving their professional level.

Recently, one of the candidates asked me to share my lists with him and I thought this information could be valuable to other people so I have decided to share it here on my blog.

Must-Read Books List

First …

We maintain a lot of servers under Kinja, so we have to use some orchestrator software to perform some tasks on a lot of servers. The Ansbile software is used by us, because it is cool.

We have also a lot of MySQL servers (and counting!) under Kinja, so we have some tasks to perform on them, such as managing replication. Of course there are some ways to do this, for example using multiplexed terminals, or run ansibile shell commands what performs mysql queries (e.g. ansible mysql-master1 -m shell -a “mysql -e “SOME SQL QUERY HERE”) but it is not too comfy, and needs a lot of manual work.

So, there is a way to make it easier for us, and that’s why I made a mysql_replication module for ansible. (And I made a pull request for that on GitHub, so I hope it will be merged soon to ‘official’ branch)

The mysql_replication module helps you to

…

Read the original article at Five More Things Deadly to Scalability

Join 6000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. 1. Slow Disk I/O – RAID 5 – Multi-tenant EBS Disk is the grounding of all your servers, and the base of their performance. True with larger and larger main memory, much is available in cache, a server still needs to constantly read from disk [...]

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

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