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. The so-called raw iron of this army of compute power sits in datacenters. Each datacenter is …

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

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1. Consulting essentials: Getting the business
2. Hiring is …

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 5 things toxic to scalability piece. …

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 [...]

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Read the original article at Beware the sales wolf in sheep suits

Recently a colleague called me up to get my opinion. Therein lies the eternal drama in organizations, the push & pull between dollars and technology best practices. We had a similar experience with a MySQL deployment, and solution framed by Oracle sales. Battle lines are drawn Clearly the battle lines are drawn now. Between director [...]

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

Related posts:

1. Beware the client
2. Open Insights 22 – Beware of Software …

Read the original article at Juggling apples & oranges in the datacenter

In which a few choice words become one serious accident… The Backstory More than five years ago now, I worked for a shop in the business of news & information around the legal and real estate sectors. It was a fairly large organization with a number of Oracle and MySQL backed applications. The whole place [...]

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

Related posts:

1. Open Insights 02 – Consulting Apples and Oranges
2. …

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 hardware, with Oracle on the backend and Apache serving webpages.

Negotiating an acquisition

As it …

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 with a sort of swat team chatting on SKYPE, while monitoring the systems closely.

…

Read the original article at Oracle to MySQL – prepare to bushwhack through the open source jungle

I was recently approached by a healthcare company for advice on suitable database solutions capable of executing its new initiative. The company was primarily an Oracle shop so naturally, they began by shopping for possible Oracle solutions.

The CTO relayed his conversation with the Oracle sales rep, who at first recommended an Oracle solution that, expensive as it may have been, ultimately aligned with the company’s existing technology and experience. Unfortunately this didn’t match their budget and so predictably, the Oracle sales rep whipped out a MySQL-based solution as an alternative.

Having worked as an Oracle DBA throughout the dot-com years, I know the technology well. I also know …

Read the original article at The Age of the Platform by Phil Simon

I picked up Phil Simon's The Age of the Platform after running into his blog, and some of his writing online. Simon is an interesting guy with an obvious strong technical background. He's also an accomplished speaker and you can find several videos of his speaking online.

The first thing that struck me about this book was how it came to be. The book was funded through Kickstarter, an online platform for people to fund their creative projects. Perhaps it was Simon trying to drive home the point of his book. But it gets better, he self-published the book through Motion Publishing. Furthermore …