The primary reasons people are moving to the public cloud are: (1) replace capital expenses with operating expenses (pay as you go); (2) use shared resources for processes like back-up, maintenance, networking (shared expenses); (3) use shared infrastructure that enables you to pay only for those resources you actually use, instead of consuming your maximum load resources at all times (pay-per-use). The first thing you’ll notice is that all 3 cloud benefits have their basis in finances or the cloud business model.
We will focus in on #3 above: Pay-Per-Use. The old school model was to build your compute infrastructure for the maximum load today, plus growth over the life-cycle of the equipment, plus some buffer so the systems don’t get overloaded from spikes in usage. The net result is that your average usage might run 10% of the potential for the infrastructure you mortgaged your home to buy. In other words, you were paying 10X more than …

When I spoke at Percona Live (video here) on running an E-commerce database in Amazon EC2, I briefly talked about using RAID 10 for additional performance and fault tolerance when using EBS volumes. At first, this seems counter intuitive. Amazon has a robust infrastructure, EBS volumes run on RAIDed hardware, and are mirrored in multiple availability zones. So, why bother? Today, I was reminded of just how important it is. Please note that all my performance statistics are based on direct experience running a MySQL database on a m2.4xlarge instance and not on some random bonnie or orion benchmark. I have those graphs floating around on my hard drive in glorious 3D and, while interesting, they do not necessarily reflect real-life performance.

Why? …

I'm about to take a week off from my new gig as COO at Zendesk and it got me reflecting on the company and my decision to join.  I stayed with MySQL through the Sun acquisition and left when Oracle acquired Sun.  Although I have a lot of respect for Oracle, it seemed to me the only interesting jobs would be those that report directly to Larry Ellison.  So I took some time off to travel, worked as an EIR at Scale Ventures for a few months and began thinking about what I wanted to do next.

I turned down offers from companies and investors to come in and "repeat the MySQL playbook" in Big Data or NoSQL or apps or whatever.  I think Open Source can be a fantastic …

Version 2 of the PBMS daemon is now ready.

Here are the major changes introduced with this version:

• PBMS is fully integrated with MySQL 5.5:
  PBMS is now provided as a patch for MySQL 5.5 which simplifies installation and provides numerous benefits.
  
  
  • All engines are "PBMS enabled":
    PBMS no longer requires that you have a "PBMS enabled" storage engine to be able to use PBMS.
    
    
  • The MySQL client lib provides the PBMS client API:
    You no longer need to link your application to a separate PBMS lib to use the PBMS 'C' API.
    
    
  • mysqldump understands PBMS BLOB URLS:
    When dumping tables or databases containing PBMS BLOB URLs mysqldump will dump the referenced BLOBs as binary data to a …

The Open DB Camp in Sardinia 2011 has had a number of sessions on varying topics. Topics range from MySQL over MongoDB to replication and High Availability.

I decided to tap into the database expert resources present here at Sardegna Ricerche by discussing a non-database issue, where one can expert database experts to have insights beyond those of end users. And they did.

The topic was the particular case of information overload many of us suffer from on our hard disks: Too many files, too hard to find.

• How do we find the bank statement from April 2007 from the more-seldom-used account?
• What are the ten best work-related pictures from last year?
• Is this the most current …

Disclaimer: the information in this post is the author’s personal opinion and is not the opinion or policy of his employer.

It was spring 2010 when we decided that even though Softlayer‘s server provisioning system is really great and it takes only a few hours to get a new server when we need it, it is still too long sometimes. We wanted to be able to scale up when needed and do it faster. It was especially critical because we were working hard on bringing up Facebook integration to our site and that project could have dramatically changed our application servers cloud capacity requirements.

What buzzword comes to your mind when we talk about scaling up really fast, sometimes within minutes, not hours or days? Exactly – cloud computing! So, after some initial testing and playing around with Softlayer’s (really young back then) cloud solution …

I’m giving two talks tomorrow (Tuesday) at the MySQL Conference and Expo:

HailDB: A NoSQL API direct to InnoDB, 2:00pm, Ballroom D

Dropping ACID: Eating Data In A Web 2.0 Cloud World 3:05pm, Ballroom G

The HailDB talk is all about a C API to embed an InnoDB based relational database engine into your application. Awesome stuff (also nice and technical).

The second talk, “Dropping ACID: Eating Data in a Web 2.0 Cloud World” is not only a joke that only database people get, but a humorous and serious look at data integrity and reliability as promised by the current hype. This was quite well received at linux.conf.au in January. So, if you weren’t in Australia in January this year, then certainly come along and see how you go …

So, you are thinking about Cloud Computing? Is it a fad, along the lines of SOA, OOP, NoSQL, ORDBMS or is it a new paradigm when it comes to infrastructure? (not that a fad is bad, it's just that a fad, in my mind, is something that is grossly overblown in proportion. OOP is a good thing, but tell you what, OO-talibans out there, despite what you may think, OOP will not create peace in the middle east (if it did, I'd embrace it right now)).

But all that aside, what is in the Cloud, really? And from a technical standpoint, it seems simple enough: Your servers running across a number of virtual machines, with virtual disks and what have you not, where you pay for resource use and you share the environment with a bunch of other users. And that really is not that complicated. And from a pure technical view, that is it, sort of, but there is more to it than that, because when you come to run your stuff in a cloud, you realize that things …

At linux.conf.au 2011 in Brisbane, I had the honor of co-presenting a talk on Rolling Your Own Cloud with SUSE’s Tim Serong. Take a look!

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