Cloud Application Architectures

Cloud Application Architectures. By George Reese, O’Reilly 2009. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site).

This is a great book on how to build apps in the cloud! I was happy to see how much depth it went into. It’s short — 150 pages plus some appendixes — so I was expecting it to be a superficial overview. But it isn’t. It is thorough. And it is also obviously built on his own experience building very specific applications that he uses to run his business — he isn’t preaching about stuff he doesn’t know first-hand. Finally, George Reese is a good writer! It’s impressive. This is how he covers so much ground with so much depth in so few pages, …

My ongoing dialogue with Matthew Aslett inspired me to read more of his recent writings. An excellent piece Do not sell anything to your community is based on a blog post by Stephen Walli.

Inspired by Stephen, I also looked into a set of slides I recently created and will try that style for this post...

Aslett and Stephen make a great point:

the conversion of community users into paying customers has long been a concern for open source-related vendors. It has also long been a source of friction, with vendors that offer proprietary extensions being accused of “bait and switch” or otherwise undermining the value of the open source software in an attempt compel community …

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 …

There’s exciting news about Ulf Sandberg starting up a new MySQL services company.  I respect Ulf tremendously – he’s a great guy with good business sense.  That said, others have suggested that staff from the MySQL Support team need a new home – an assertion that simply is untrue.  MySQL Support has a great home [...]

New Addition: Why you need a Part-time Remote MySQL Expert

I have a friend who works as a MySQL recruiter. He recently told me that he cannot find any more MySQL DBAs in the UK or in the neighbouring countries. His words were "I've exhausted the market".

I myself know that there is a shortage of MySQL DBAs and that a lot of recruitment agencies are looking for them. So I started to wonder how come the situation is the way it is?


Experience curve

Usually what I see in companies, is that they start out with the developers taking care of the databases along side their usual coding duties. At some point, they complain to management that they need a professional DBA to handle the database. When the complaints get loud enough, management looks for a …

A long time ago, in the early 1980's, I decided to change jobs. I was a young guy, with no real experience of commercial software or anything like that, rather I was a self-taught sysadmin for an ancient UNix system. The company I worked for was in the Telco business, so I looked for another job where I could develop myself and at the same to use my telco knowledge.

I found a Telco startup, privately held. I must say that the fact that it was privately held meant nothing to me at the time. Nothing. They were building a system, the servers were VAXes running VMS, and again a became a sysadmin.

Having been sysadmin at this company for a while, building up the central datacenter (to be honest, in todays words, that was what I was doing, but at the time, I had no real clue. I was mosr enthusiastic and ready to take on any task than I was smart or intelligent or knew what I was doing, really). But I wanted to develop myself, …

Monty says:

During the last 2 years, I have seen a lot of the people that originally worked at MySQL AB and who joined Sun together with me, go away in different directions. More than 50 % of them have already left Sun/Oracle.

Matthew Montgomery commented...

I'm curious where you are getting that > 50% number? How would you have any access to that sort of HR information? Sounds like one of those numbers that falls under the "83% of all statistics are made up" rule.

And Monty answered

The MySQL Alumini in linkedin group has close to 200 members, a majority that also joined Sun and this group doesn't include all people that have left. I have also heard the number 50 % from MySQL people that recently left Oracle, so I have good reasons to believe that this figure is reasonable accurate. …