Read the original article at Why your cloud is speeding for a scalability cliff

Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. Don’t believe me that you’re headed for the cliff? A startup scales up to no avail Towards the end of 2012 I worked with an internet startup in the online education space. Their web application was not unusual, built in PHP and using Linux, Apache & Mysql [...]

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

Read the original article at Cloud DBA and Management Interview

What does a cloud computing expert need to know? This is the last of a three part guide to interviewing for a cloud operations position. You can find them here – part one Operations Interview and part two Deployment Interview. Here’s my guide to do just that. 1. Database administration experience Although in some shops [...]

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

Read the original article at Crisis Management in the Crosshairs – Sandy

Crisis Management During Sandy

The news this past week has brought endless images of devastation. All metropolitan region, the damage is apparent.

More than once in conversation I’ve commented “That’s similar to what I do.” The response is often one of confusion. So I go on to clarify. Web operations is every bit about disaster recovery and crisis management in the datacenter. If you saw Con Edison down in the trenches you might not know how that power gets to your building, or what all those

Read the original article at Cloud Deployment Interview

What does a cloud computing expert need to know? In part one of the cloud interview guide we covered some basic unix & Linux systems administration skills, and cloud computing and infrastructure concepts. Those are key starting points. You might also want to jump to part 3 cloud dba, architecture and management interview questions.

In this second part, let’s dig into deploying applications in the cloud, and day to

Read the original article at Real Disaster Recovery Lessons from Sandy

Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. Having just spent the last 24 hours in lower manhattan, while Hurricane Sandy rolled through, it’s offered some first hand lessons on disaster recovery. Watching the city and state officials, Con Edison, first responders and hospitals deal with the disaster brings some salient insights. 1. What are [...]

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

Read the original article at Cloud Operations Interview

What does a cloud computing expert need to know? How do you hire a cloud computing expert? Competition for operations & DBAs is fierce, so you’ll want to know how to find the best.

If you’re a systems administrator or ops guy, you may want to prepare for an interview for such a position. Meanwhile, if you’re a director of it or operations, a recruiter or manager in HR, you’ll want to have some idea how to find the right candidate.

Here’s my guide to do just that. You may

Read the original article at AirBNB didn’t have to fail

Today part of Amazon Web Services failed, taking down with it a slew of startups that all run on Amazon’s Cloud infrastructure. AirBNB was one of the biggest, but also Heroku, Reddit, Minecraft, Flipboard & Coursera down with it. Its not the first time. What the heck happened, and why should we care?

1. Root Cause

The AWS service allows companies like AirBNB to build web applications, and host them on servers owned and managed by Amazon.

Read the original article at Why do people leave consulting?

As a long time freelancer, it’s a question that’s intrigued me for some time. I do have some theories… First, definitions… I’m not talking about working for a large consulting firm. Although this role may be called “consultant”, my meaning is consultant as sole proprietor, entrepreneur, gun for hire or lone wolf. 1. Make more [...]

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

Read the original article at Anatomy of a Performance Review

A lot of firms come to us with a specific scalability problem. “Our user base is growing rapidly and the website is falling over!” Or they’re selling more widgets, “Our shopping cart is slowing down and we’re seeing users abandon their purchases”. These are real startup growing pains, so what to do?

We like to take a measured approach with these types of challenges, so we thought it would be helpful to run through a hypothetical scenario and see how we work.

Having trouble with scalability? Check out our

Read the original article at Hiring is a numbers game

On a recent twitter chat (#hfchat) I posted some comments about hiring. Some folks were complaining that they had applied to various jobs, and not heard back.

I commented…

In today’s market, there are hundreds of job applicants for every position. Sad to say, but that means things become a blur after a while. There’s less chance to sift each candidate and find out who they really are or what they really know. It’s more about keywords, and buzzwords if you must, to get your

Read the original article at Why you should attend Percona Live 2012

What I loved about Percona Live 2011 Last year I was excited to go to Percona Live for the first time in NYC. I arrived just in time to hear Harrison Fisk from Facebook speak about some of the awesome tweaks they’re running with MySQL there. It’s not everyday that you get to hear from [...]

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

Read the original article at Upcoming for Scalable Startups

Just back from the Labor Day holiday, and ready to dive back in.

I thought this would be a great time to outline some of our upcoming topics so here goes…

1. Why Oracle usability sucks

- a rant about Oracle’s weak points

In the meantime take a peek at our piece on why we wrote the book on Oracle & Open Source. We ruminate on trends in the datacenter and take a stab at Oracle’s future.

2. Why relational databases don’t scale

- Is there any such thing as automatic scalability?
- What blocks scalability?
- Are NoSQL databases magic?

Also one of our articles that went viral –

Read the original article at 31 Essential Blogs for Startups & Scalability

So many blogs, so little time! Here’s our list of the best we’ve found. Currently our favorite reader is Pulse pictured left. Starting to play around with flipboard too.

Nuts & Bolts Technical

Slashdot
One of the original tech blogs, that still covers lots of breaking news, and difficult topics. Very technical, with probing commentary. Beware the actual comments though, as they’re often full of immature

Read the original article at Opportunity a day – career risk at bay

Free Agent. Stress Test. Avoid Sameness

As the globalization juggernaut rolls on, it continues to create more Detroits. Skills and perspectives quickly become obsolete.

What to do in the face of such change?

So there’s your quick answer. Get the book if you want more!

Some related material: why is it so hard to find a mysql dba?.

Read the original article at Sometimes… let things break a little

Have you ever started a new project, just into it you realize that maybe there aren’t technical problems to solve? It starts to dawn on you the real crux of the problem boils down to people & processes?

It’s happened to me on a number of occasions, but once in particular really stands out for me.

I was working for a firm in the education space, in particular around test preparations.

Asked to automate a publish process

The environment had a mix of relational databases, from SQL*Server to MySQL for some applications. The web facing database

Read the original article at Where’s my 80 million dollars?

Way back in the heydays of the dot-com boom, the year is 1999.

I worked for a medium size internet startup called Method Five. When I came on board they were having a terrible time with their site performance.

Website crashing

When I first met the team, I was tasked with performance problems. After all their flagship web property kept crashing, and it didn’t look good to investors. As with most web properties in those days it was a home-grown datacenter in the back of the office, running on Sun Microsystems

Read the original article at A CTO Must Never Do This…

A couple years back I was contacted to look at a very strange problem.

The firm ran flash sales. An email goes out at noon, the website traffic explodes for a couple of hours, then settles back down to a trickle.

Of course you might imagine where this is going. During that peak, the MySQL database was brought to its knees. I was asked to do analysis during this peak load, and identify and fix problems. Make it go faster, please!

First day on the job I’m working with a team of outsourced DBAs. I was also working

Read the original article at The Art of Resistance

Sometimes, you have to be the bad guy. Be resistant to change. Here’s a story about how stubbornness pays off. As we’ve written about before A 4 letter word divides Dev & Ops.

I had one experience working as the primary MySQL DBA for an internet startup. Turns out they had Oracle for some applications too. And another DBA just to handle the Oracle stuff.

So it came time for Oracle guy to go on vacation. Suddenly these Oracle systems landed on my shoulders. We reviewed

Read the original article at What Recession? – New York Tech Hiring Frenzy

According to Crains, New York is digital jobs central.  ZocDoc, Thrillist, Foursquare and 10gen are just a few of the hot shots located at 568 Broadway, a tech hub in Soho.  Each of these firms is looking to double their headcount in the coming year.  Not bad considering the rough shape much of the economy is in.

Don’t Forget the Big Boys

Let’s not forget the huge tech firms that are also on a hiring binge,  Google, Facebook, Zynga, Twitter & Skype are all hiring.  Bloomberg Businessweek describes it

Read the original article at Best of Guide – Highlights of Our Popular Content

We cherry pick the top 5 most popular posts of various topics we’ve covered in recent months.

• 5 Things Toxic to Scalability

We use a broad brush to highlight the biggest no-nos in web application scalability.

• 5 Ways to Boost Scalability for MySQL

We dig into scalability, steering to the richest areas to focus on.

• 8 Best Practices for Deploying MySQL

Read the original article at Consulting essentials: Building your business

In the last two posts on how to build a successful consulting business I shared advice and tips on closing deals and managing and completing your engagements.

This post will look at where to focus your efforts in order to sustain your consulting business, and build skills.

Focus on your subject matter expertise

Being a subject matter expert takes years of education, and professional experience to build. It’s your

Read the original article at Consulting essentials: Managing & Completing Engagements

This is the second in a series of three articles on Consulting Essentials.
Read the previous post, Consulting essentials: Getting the business

Communicating well and knowing when to step in or stand back is the linchpin of successful consulting.
Some people have natural charm. If you’re one of these people you’ll find consulting is definitely for you. You’ll use that skill all the time as each new client brings a half dozen or a dozen new people to interact with.

If it doesn’t come easily, practice practice practice. Try to get out of your own head

Read the original article at Top MySQL DBA interview questions (Part 2)

Continuing from our Top MySQL DBA interview questions (Part 1) here are five more questions that test a MySQL DBA’s knowledge, with two that will help suss out some personality traits.

Disk performance should be an ever present concern to a DBA.  So although they don’t need to be a storage specialist, they should have a working knowledge.  Ask them about RAID versions, mirroring versus striping, and so forth.  Mirroring combines two disks as a unit.  Every write is duplicated on both disks.  If you lose one disk, you have an immediate copy.  Like a tandem truck that has spare tires running in parallel.

Read the original article at Top MySQL DBA interview questions (Part 1)

MySQL DBAs are in greater demand now than they’ve ever been. While some firms are losing the fight for talent, promising startups with a progressive bent are getting first dibs with the best applicants. Whatever the case, interviewing for a MySQL DBA is a skill in itself so I thought I’d share a guide of top MySQL DBA interview questions to help with your screening process.
It’s long and detailed with some background to give context so I will be publishing this in two parts.

Read the original article at The Problem with Startup Bootcamps

Scanning Crains NY Business recently, I saw an article on 'starting up' in 54 hours.  It's the brainchild of Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen and Franck Nouyrigat called Startup Weekend. Startup bootcamps seem to be the current extra-curricular activity of choice these days. Wharton is also getting in on it with their

Read the original article at The Mythical MySQL DBA

I’ve  been getting more than my fair share of calls from recruiters of late. Even in this depressed economic climate where jobs are rarer than a cab at rush-hour, it’s heartening to know that tech engineers are in great demand. And it’s even more heartening to think that demand for MySQL DBAs has never been better.

My reckoning was confirmed by a Bloomberg news report about stalwart retailers suffering from a dearth of talented engineers. Bloomberg cited Target’s outage-prone e-commerce site as a symptom of, among other things the market’s shortage. One of the challenges old-timers like Target face is having to compete with Silicon Valley startups

Read the original article at Great Interactive Map of NYC Startups

Business Insider posted this spectacular interactive google map of our amazing Startup Ecosystem here in New York City.  Wow!

Check out the full list of NYC Startups in the original article.

View NYC Startups in a larger map

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

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,

Read the original article at Book Review – The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

What do you do after founding not one, but two companies and watching them fail miserably all by the time you were barely out of college?

Move to the Valley, make shrewd investments in other startups and become insanely rich like Sean Parker? A Bit lofty perhaps. How about try, try again and succeed. Then reinvent yourself as a guru dishing out startup wisdom through your blog and publishing a book that ends up the top of the New York Times Bestseller's list. That's essentially what Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup

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