MySQL configuration management remains a hot topic, as I’ve noticed on numerous occasions during my conversations with customers.

I thought it might be a good idea to start a blog series that goes deeper in detail into some of the different options, and what modules potentially might be used for managing your MySQL database infrastructure.

Configuration management has been around since way before the beginning of my professional career. I, myself, originally began working on integrating an infrastructure with my colleagues using Puppet.

Why is configuration management important?

• Reproducibility. It’s giving us the ability to provision any environment in an automated way, and feel sure that the new environment will contain …

One of the most common engagements I do is working with firms in and around the NYC startup sector. I evaluate AWS infrastructures & applications built in the Amazon cloud. Join 32,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. I’ve seen some patterns in customers usage of Amazon. Below is a laundry list of … Continue reading 5 core pieces of the Amazon Cloud puzzle to get your project off the ground → …

We are big fans of automation which is also one of the reasons why we started TwinDB. We want to remove the pain around manual redundant jobs and automate them so that you can focus on what is important for your business.

Why Chef?

Awesome Chef

Chef is a great example of how automation can be successfully applied to infrastructure such that your infrastructure becomes easily deployable, manageable, testable and well documented. Whenever, I talk about the benefits of using Chef, I greatly highlight how writing Chef cookbooks essentially documents your infrastructure. Isn’t it great to have a well documented infrastructure, that anyone can reference to? How many times have I not heard someone tell me how they have no idea how a particular service was deployed, or what was deployed on a particular machine? Many many times, …

Check Out Our Latest Technical Resources for MySQL, MariaDB & MongoDB Clusters

Like every month this year, we have created new content and tools for you; here is a summary of what we’ve published this December. Please do check it out and let us know if you have any comments or feedback.

And thank you for following us in the past 12 months and for your fidelity; we look forward to “seeing” you next year as well and wish you a great start to 2015!

New Live Technical Webinars

Infrastructure automation isn’t easy, but it’s not rocket science either, says Riaan Nolan. Riaan has been in operations for the past decade, and has built over a dozen eCommerce …

If you are automating your infrastructure deployments with Chef, then read on. We are glad to announce the availability of a Chef cookbook for ClusterControl. This cookbook replaces previous cookbooks we released for ClusterControl and Galera Cluster. For those using Puppet, please have a look at our Puppet module for ClusterControl.

ClusterControl Cookbook on Chef Supermarket

The ClusterControl cookbook is available on Chef Supermarket, and getting the cookbook is as easy as:

$ knife cookbook site download clustercontrol

This cookbook supports the installation of ClusterControl on top of existing database clusters:

• Galera Cluster
  • MySQL Galera Cluster by Codership
  …

For an online shop, the website is the cash register. It has to be open for business 24 hours a day.

As the ops person on duty, when you get a call at 3am after your website went down, your priority number one is to restore the service asap. But why can we not have our application stack automatically recover, and not have the pager wake us at all? Why do we still stick to tedious manual processes, which take up time and resources, and hinder future growth?

Infrastructure automation isn’t easy, but it’s not rocket science either, says Riaan Nolan. Riaan has been in operations for the past decade, and has built over a dozen eCommerce properties. Automation is a worthwhile investment for retailers serious about eCommerce, but deciding on which tools to invest in can be a confusing and overwhelming process.

Join us for this webinar to understand the key pain points that online retailers experience which indicate it’s time …

Join 27,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. I was shocked to find this article on ReadWrite: The Truth About DevOps: IT Isn’t Dead; It’s not even Dying. Wait a second, do people really think this? Truth is I have heard whispers of this before. I was at a meetup recently where the […]

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 […]

Over the past couple of years, several tools have come up to solve some of the long standing problems for developers, DBAs and operations teams. This list is no where near exhaustive and your mileage may vary.

These tools should let you get up and coding, saving your code to a central place.

I run (Mac/Windows), I need a Linux server to learn some of this cool stuff, right?

Not exactly. VirtualBox is a virtualization project for multiple platforms (Mac, Win, Linux, Solaris) that allows you to run a guest OS right from your laptop or desktop. There are repositories of images (alternative here) that you can use to get yourself going quickly, or you can provision your own.

I set up (cool open source package here) and now my team …

Continuent, a leading provider of database clustering and replication software has five (5) new positions open:

Build/Test Engineer Senior Database Availability and Clustering Engineer Senior Database Replication Engineer Data Replication Sales Engineer Clustering and Replication Test Development Engineer

If you want to get in on the ground floor of a growing company in a challenging field