Growth is good, right? Yes, unless you are the one building and managing a MySQL database tier to handle all this growth!

Your company has built a great new app and launched it in the cloud. And now you are seeing what many wish for: an exponential adoption of your app. 

But is your database tier really up to the job? 

What happens if your MySQL server fails? Can you fail over to a replica

Recently I had to turn a few EC2 instances into MySQL database servers. The third time I had to do it, I grabbed the list of steps from my previous sessions and just replayed it. Later I thought maybe polishing information a little bit and publishing a step-by-step walkthrough on the blog may help a few people. So here it is.

Before you begin.

For my MySQL instances I used the following:

• Extra Large, High-Memory, and High-CPU instances. Although the instruction should work on any type of instance.
• RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.2 64-bit AMI
• For MySQL data storage, multiple identical EBS devices attached to each instance

The configuration template provided in this post assumes the new MySQL instance only needs InnoDB storage engine.

Grab the packages.

Download the appropriate packages from MySQL web page. You …

My first computer program was written almost quarter a century ago on a BK-0010 computer.  It was very simple: the program asked the user to enter their name and then greeted the user using the entered name, like “Hello, Artem!”.  I was fascinated.  A couple of lines written in Vilnius BASIC transformed a piece of metal and silicon into a considerate thing that cared about a person’s name enough to remember it :-).  Of course, the first experience doesn’t represent the day-to-day routine of software development, but the moments when I see a couple of lines making an amazing transformation still enchant me, and remind me why I’ve been writing code all this time.

I’ve just experienced this very same first-time feeling as we’ve released …

WordPress on S3: run a beautiful website on Amazon S3 cloud storage

OblakSoft is proud to introduce the 1st ever dynamic WordPress site running on top of Amazon S3: Yapixx.  Now you too can launch your own beautiful website on Amazon S3.

While Yapixx stands for Yet Another Picture Sharing Site, it is actually one of a kind.  Yapixx is WordPress that was moved to run on top of Amazon S3 storage without changing a line of code in the WordPress core engine.

• What is Yapixx?
• …

OblakSoft is pleased to showcase how simple it is to run LAMP applications on the cloud storage.  OblakSoft configured the WordPress web publishing platform to run on Amazon S3 storage and made the recipe available for anyone to replicate.  A ready-to-run WordPress site (configured as Yapixx) – is available for public use for FREE.  Yapixx is WordPress configured as a picture sharing website that runs on top of Amazon S3 (Yapixx stands for Yet Another Picture Sharing Site).

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I had to benchmark an EC2 instance to see whether a database could be safely moved to it. It is a good practice, which helps avoiding surprises when an instance or its storage are allocated in a noisy neighborhood, where the neighbors use so much resources that it affects the performance of our MySQL database. It is understandable that one can never get very reliable results on EC2, this is a shared environment after all, and that some fluctuations should be expected, however it is still good to know the numbers. I started my benchmarks and everything seemed fine at first, but then sometimes statistics I was getting started looking quite odd.

I was running the benchmarks on a High-CPU Extra Large Instance and couldn’t see any reliability in the results at all. I mean, in one moment I was getting poor throughput and horrible response times only to see it improve a lot a few minutes later. I ruled out a possibility that it could be …

Yesterday (4/19) I attended the AWS Summit in NYC (http://aws.amazon.com/aws-summit-2012/nyc).

I'm a big fan and also a heavy user of AWS especially S3, EC2, and naturally, RDS. In every point in time I have several dozens of AWS machines running for me out there in the East region, and in some cases when we do some special benchmarks and tests, number of EC2 and RDS machines can easily reach 3-digit. As I said, I'm a fan...

A few quotes I was able to catch and document on my laptop, on my laps...:
"When you develop an app for facebook, you must be prepared (and be afraid) that to your party, not noone will show up, but everybody will show up!" So true! Simple and true. We all want to succeed, to have success with our app. We have to think about scaling from day 1.
"Database was bottleneck for building of sophisticated apps. This is …

Recent Tips and News on Java, Java EE 6, GlassFish & more :

I am very pleased to say that earlier today, SkySQL announced it has raised $4 Million in Series A Round Funding.

Let me post the main part of the press release here:

SAN JOSE – April 18, 2012 – SkySQL, the first choice in affordable database solutions for the MySQL® and MariaDB® databases in the enterprise and the cloud, today announces that the company has raised $4 million in Series A funding from a number of investors, including OnCorps, an elite peer-based community of veteran technology investors and advisors committed to bringing better, cost-disruptive technologies into the mainstream. Also funding the round are European investors including Finnish Industry Investment Ltd., Spintop Ventures and Open Ocean Capital.

SkySQL will primarily use the investment to fund growth in its new product development, including adding critical positions. This is the …

  Plug-in to Vegas The program focuses on key topics such as high availability, virtualization, security, business intelligence, Exadata, Cloud Computing and internals.  Recently added, we switched around the schedule to include the Thursday Deep Dive, Avoiding Downtime through the Maximum … Continue reading →