The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

I was talking with Todd Hoff recently over at High Scalability about a trend I’ve seen of late. ME: I really liked this post by Zoli Kahan from Clay.io.  AWS, cloudflare, docker, haproxy, mysql, mongo, memcache, ansible.  They use just about every technology being talked about these days.   Todd: Yah, that’s why I asked […]

Leo Polovets of Susa Ventures publishes an excellent blog called Coding VC. There you can find some excellent posts, such as pitches by analogy, and an algorithm for seed round valuations and analyzing product hunt data. He recently wrote a blog post about a topic near and dear to my heart, Which Technologies do Startups […]

A week or two ago, I got into a conversation on Twitter about technical debt, and someone shared this superb video by Ward Cunningham (youtube). Here is Ward’s Interview website.

Join 10,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

Waterfall, agile, developer or operations, devops, managers, CTOs… everyone should watch this video, for it cuts to the heart of the challenges we face doing modern software development, in a fast paced and always changing environment.

Though it’s not mentioned in the video, I would argue using an ORM is an expensive form of debt, one that …

Read the original article at Why your cloud is speeding for a scalability cliff

Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. Don’t believe me that you’re headed for the cliff? A startup scales up to no avail Towards the end of 2012 I worked with an internet startup in the online education space. Their web application was not unusual, built in PHP and using Linux, Apache & Mysql [...]

For more articles like these go to Sean Hull's Scalable Startups

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Read the original article at Cloud DBA and Management Interview

What does a cloud computing expert need to know? This is the last of a three part guide to interviewing for a cloud operations position. You can find them here – part one Operations Interview and part two Deployment Interview. Here’s my guide to do just that. 1. Database administration experience Although in some shops [...]

For more articles like these go to Sean Hull's Scalable Startups

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1. Oracle DBA Interview Questions
2. Cloud Operations Interview
3. …

Read the original article at Crisis Management in the Crosshairs – Sandy

Crisis Management During Sandy

The news this past week has brought endless images of devastation. All metropolitan region, the damage is apparent.

More than once in conversation I’ve commented “That’s similar to what I do.” The response is often one of confusion. So I go on to clarify. Web operations is every bit about disaster recovery and crisis management in the datacenter. If you saw Con Edison down in the trenches you might not know how that power gets to your building, or what all those pipes down there do, but you know when it’s out! You know when something is out of order.

That’s why …

Read the original article at Cloud Deployment Interview

What does a cloud computing expert need to know? In part one of the cloud interview guide we covered some basic unix & Linux systems administration skills, and cloud computing and infrastructure concepts. Those are key starting points. You might also want to jump to part 3 cloud dba, architecture and management interview questions.

In this second part, let’s dig into deploying applications in the cloud, and day to day operations skills. There’s a lot of material here. We …

Read the original article at Real Disaster Recovery Lessons from Sandy

Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. Having just spent the last 24 hours in lower manhattan, while Hurricane Sandy rolled through, it’s offered some first hand lessons on disaster recovery. Watching the city and state officials, Con Edison, first responders and hospitals deal with the disaster brings some salient insights. 1. What are [...]

For more articles like these go to Sean Hull's Scalable Startups

Related posts:

1. What is disaster recovery and why is it important?
2. …

Read the original article at Cloud Operations Interview

What does a cloud computing expert need to know? How do you hire a cloud computing expert? Competition for operations & DBAs is fierce, so you’ll want to know how to find the best.

If you’re a systems administrator or ops guy, you may want to prepare for an interview for such a position. Meanwhile, if you’re a director of it or operations, a recruiter or manager in HR, you’ll want to have some idea how to find the right candidate.

Here’s my guide to do just that. You may also jump to …