New Euro Partnership offers safe-haven from US Patriot Act
Severalnines and City Network launch first fully European ‘Database as a Service’

STOCKHOLM and LONDON, 23rd November -Severalnines, provider of automation and management software for cloud database platforms, and City Network, the ‘data center in a browser’ company have announced the first fully European Database as a Service (DBaaS) solution - in beta form. The City Cloud Database Service is based and operated by companies in the European Union - offering European customers full compliance with EU Directive on Data Protection 95/46/EC and a safe haven from the reaches of the US Patriot Act.

EU customers can now benefit from the savings and flexibility enabled by cloud-based database services safe in the knowledge that they …

Read the original article at Seattle Web Tech Meetup Nov 21

I'll be one of two speakers at the next Seattle Web Technology Bi-Weekly Meet up on Nov 21 at the Citrus Lounge.

They've sexed it up a little by calling it a face-off between Windows Azure and Amazon EC2  (no prizes for guessing which side I represent) but really it's going to be a primer on the Platform-as-a service and Infrastructure-as-a-service models. I expect some lively discussions during Q&A.

I'll be covering questions such as what cloud computing is, what EC2 provides, what is datacenter automation and the …

Read the original article at The market for Cloud Computing

Saw this awesome infographic by Cloud Spectator on twitter today. A great snapshot of the expected growth in Cloud Computing. If the Cloud Computing market was stacked up against world economies it would be the 51st largest in the world with massive inequality - Amazon has half the share.

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

Read the original article at $1000 per hour Servers, Anyone?

Amazon's spot market for computing power is set up as an open market for surplus servers. The price is dynamic and depends on demand. So when demand is low, you can get computing instances for rock bottom prices. When you do that you normally set a range of prices you're willing to pay. If it goes over your top end, your instances get killed and re-provisioned for someone else. Obviously this wouldn't work for all applications, like a website that has to be up all the time, but for computing power, say to run some huge hedge fund analytics, it might fit perfectly.

A recent post on SEO MOZ alerted us to an interesting story where spot instances spiked to $1000 per …

Red Hat’s $136m acquisition of open source storage vendor Gluster marks Red Hat’s biggest buy since JBoss and starts the fourth quarter with a very intersting deal. The acquisition is definitely good for Red Hat since it bolsters its Cloud Forms IaaS and OpenShift PaaS technology and strategy with storage, which is often the starting point for enterprise and service provider cloud computing deployments. The acquisition also gives Red Hat another weapon in its fight against VMware, Microsoft and others, including OpenStack, of which Gluster is a member (more on that further down). The deal is also good for Gluster given the sizeable price Red Hat is paying for the provider of open source, software-based, scale-out storage for unstructured data and also as validation of both open source and software in today’s IT and cloud computing storage.

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Back in 2010 I stopped buying test servers from Dell and began building them from components using Intel i7 processors, X58-based mother boards, and modular power supplies from Ultra.  It was a good way to learn about hardware.  Besides, it was getting old to pay for Dell desktop systems with Windows, which I would then wipe off when installing Linux.  Between the educational value of understanding the systems better, selecting the exact components I wanted, and being able to fix problems quickly, it has been one of the best investments I have ever made.  And it didn't cost any more than equivalent Dell servers.

For this reason, a couple of recent articles about computer hardware caught my attention.  First, Dell is losing business as companies like Facebook build their own …

It’s been some time now that we’ve been talking about devops, the pushing together of application development and application deployment via IT operations, in the enterprise. To keep up to speed on the trend, 451 CAOS attended PuppetConf, a conference for the Puppet Labs community of IT administrators, developers and industry leaders around the open source Puppet server configuration and automation software. One thing that seems clear, given the talk about agile development and operations, cloud computing, business and culture, our definition of devops continues to be accurate.

Another consistent part of devops that also emerged at PuppetConf last week was the way it tends to introduce additional stakeholders beyond software developers and IT …

 Oracle starts charging for MySQL Add-ons

Exciting news, Oracle just announced commercial MySQL extensions that they'll be offering paid extensions to the core MySQL free product.

To be sure, this has raised waves of concern among the community, but on the whole I suspect it will be a good thing for MySQL.  This brings more commercial addons to the table, which only increases the options for customers.  Many will continue to use the core database product only, and avoid license hassles while others will surely embark on a hybrid approach if it solves their everyday business problems.

Speaking of licensing, back in May, Amazon announced that it's RDS or Relational Database Service would now offer Oracle as an option. …

1. This page or area of the website is very slow, why?

There are a lot of components that make up modern internet websites, and a lot of places to get stuck in the mud.  Website performance starts with the browser, what caching it is doing, their bandwidth to your server, what the webserver is doing (caching or not and how), if the webserver has sufficient memory, and then what the application code is doing and lastly how it is interacting with the backend database.

With all this complexity, it's no wonder so many sites struggle.  Typically these types of analysis start with some load testing, to stress test your setup, so you can watch for leaks.  Then some tools are applied to the webserver tier, and the database tier to see where the bottleneck lies.  It may be in the network …

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
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