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 …

With the fast growth of virtualized data centers, and companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook, it's easy to forget how much is built on open-source components, aka commodity software.  In a very real way open-source has enabled the huge explosion of commodity hardware, the fast growth of the internet itself, and now the further acceleration through cloud services, cloud infrastructure, and virtualization of data centers.

Your typical internet stack and application now stands on the shoulders of tens of thousands of open source developers and projects.  Let's look at a few of them.

1. Operating System - Linux

The commodity hardware craze would never have happened without the help of an open-source operating system to run on it.  Linux is an old story now, nonetheless everything else stands on it's shoulders.

2. Multi-purpose Webserver - Apache

As of July …

If you're headhunting a cloud computing expert, specifically someone who knows Amazon Web Services (AWS) and EC2, you'll want to have a battery of questions to ask them to assess their knowledge.  As with any technical interview focus on concepts and big picture.  As the 37Signals folks like to say "hire for attitude, train for skill".  Absolutely!

1. Explain Elastic Block Storage?  What type of performance can you expect?  How do you back it up?  How do you improve performance?

EBS is a virtualized SAN or storage area network.  That means it is RAID storage to start with so it's redundant and fault tolerant.  If disks die in that RAID you don't lose data.  Great!  It is also virtualized, so you can provision and allocate storage, and attach it to your server with various API calls.  No calling the …

Modern internet infrastructure are complex.  Components and services are prone to failure.  Resiliency involves building redundancy, best practices and processes into your architecture to make you able to bend and not break.

• Migrating to cloud service providers
• Rearchitecting and refactoring applications to scale
• Scaling the database tier - MySQL and Oracle
• Building redundancy into every layer
• Deploying object caches - memcache
• Deploying page caches - varnish
• Migrating to Innodb - transactional storage engine
• Infrastructure design
• Infrastructure automation
• Disaster Recovery
• Business Continuity with cloud deployments

Call or Skype us in New York City +1-212-533-6828

MySQL databases are great work horses of the internet.  They back tons of modern websites, from blogs and checkout carts, to huge sites like Facebook.  But these technologies don't run themselves.  When you're faced with a system that is slowing down, you'll need the right tools to diagnose and troubleshoot the problem.  MySQL has a huge community following and that means scores of great tools for your toolbox. Here are 7 ways to troubleshoot MySQL.

1. Use innotop

Innotop is a great tool for MySQL which despite the name monitors MySQL generally as well as InnoDB usage.  It's fairly easy to install, just download the perl script. Be sure to include a [client] section to your local users .my.cnf file (you have one don't you?).  Inside that section, place one line with "user=xyz" and one line with "password=abc".

If you're concerned that installing something new is too …

Call or SKYPE us in New York City: +1-212-533-6828

MySQL in the Cloud

• Deploying MySQL in the Cloud
• Cloud Security considerations for databases
• Deploying in multiple Availability Zones
• Deploying in multiple regions
• Deploying MySQL with multi-az
• Horizontal scalability in the cloud
• MySQL spinup scripts
• Deploying Amazon RDS
• Evaluating RDS
• Evaluating MySQL in the cloud
• EBS Performance considerations
• Tuning MySQL parameters in the cloud
• Backup types & options
• Mitigating against cloud server failure
• Vertical scalability & MySQL on EC2

MySQL Consulting and Services

• Backup & recovery
• MySQL master master replication
• MySQL replication & horizontal scaling …

Deploying in the Amazon cloud is touted as a great way to achieve high scalability while paying only for the computing power you use. How do you get the best scalability from the technology?

1. Use Auto-scaling

Auto-scaling is a unique feature of cloud computing and Amazon's EC2 offering. Setup a load balancer and a couple of webservers for your application as you normally would. Design your webserver based on a template AMI that you'll reuse over and over. Then setup auto-scaling and set thresholds based on the traffic you forecast. When a threshold is passed, AWS will spinup a new instance of your webserver, and roll it into the load balancer pool automatically. Once traffic falls below the scale back threshold, Amazon will take a server out of the pool for you.

Be sure to monitor this …

There are a lot of scalability challenges we see with clients over and over. The list could easily include 20, 50 or even 100 items, but we shortened it down to the biggest five issues we see.

1. Tune those queries

By far the biggest bang for your buck is query optimization. Queries can be functionally correct and meet business requirements without being stress tested for high traffic and high load. This is why we often see clients with growing pains, and scalability challenges as their site becomes more popular. This also makes sense. It wouldn't necessarily be a good use of time to tune a query for some page off in a remote corner of your site, that didn't receive real-world traffic. So some amount of reactive tuning is common and appropriate.

Enable the slow query log and watch it. Use …

Web Operations

Web Operations. By John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins, O’Reilly 2010, with a chapter by myself. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site).

I wrote a chapter for this book, and it’s now on shelves in bookstores near you. I got my dead-tree copy today and read everyone else’s contributions to it. It’s a good book. A group effort such as this one is necessarily going to have some differences in style and even overlapping content, but overall it works very well. It includes chapters from some really smart people, some of whom I was not previously familiar with. John and Jesse obviously have good connections. A …