I'm looking forward to presenting, along with Peter Boros, Jim Cooley and Vipul Sabhaya, at the Percona Live Conference the week of April 22nd where I will be giving two talks about the management of MySQL using Chef (http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2013/sessions/managing-mysql-chef 24 April 4:30pm - 5:20pm @ Ballroom A) and Red Dwarf, the Openstack project that HPCS is using for DBaaS (http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2013/sessions/reddwarf-database-service-openstack-project 25 April 11:00am - 11:50am @ Ballroom C).

I wanted to do a Chef talk, despite my on-again, off-again love/hate relationship with Chef (AKA learning process) because for the past year or so, I have …

I haven't written in a while. Some of the reason is that life has been incredibly busy with two young children. The other reason is that I've been busy at work with my team developing HP Cloud DNS, a service that runs in the cloud, as do the various other applications within the Platform as a Service group that I am part of. After a period of rapid development and deployment, Cloud DNS recently went into private beta . The ability to build an cloud application such as this was primarily that I have a great team (Kiall Mac Innes, Simon McCartney and a great product manger Josh Barry) as well as having chosen the right tools and software solutions. For the deployment side of things, Chef, despite frustrations that I have had before getting my mind around it, was a solution that I knew would make it so we could deploy anywhere, as well as being what HPCS uses for their deployments for …