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 […]

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 The Art of Resistance

Sometimes, you have to be the bad guy. Be resistant to change. Here’s a story about how stubbornness pays off. As we’ve written about before A 4 letter word divides Dev & Ops.

I had one experience working as the primary MySQL DBA for an internet startup. Turns out they had Oracle for some applications too. And another DBA just to handle the Oracle stuff.

So it came time for Oracle guy to go on vacation. Suddenly these Oracle systems landed on my shoulders. We reviewed everything in advance, then he bid his goodbyes.

Almost as soon as he was out the door I …

Read the original article at The Mythical MySQL DBA

I’ve  been getting more than my fair share of calls from recruiters of late. Even in this depressed economic climate where jobs are rarer than a cab at rush-hour, it’s heartening to know that tech engineers are in great demand. And it’s even more heartening to think that demand for MySQL DBAs has never been better.

My reckoning was confirmed by a Bloomberg news report about stalwart retailers suffering from a dearth of talented engineers. Bloomberg cited Target’s outage-prone e-commerce site as a symptom of, among other things the market’s shortage. One of the challenges old-timers like Target face is having to compete with Silicon Valley startups as a …

Read the original article at How to hire a developer that doesn’t suck

Strip by Randall Munroe; xkcd.com

First things first. This is not meant to be a beef against developers. But let’s not ignore the elephant in the living room that is the divide between brilliant code writers and the risk averse operations team.

It is almost by default that developers are disruptive with their creative coding while the guys in operations, those who deploy the code, constantly cross their fingers in the hope that application changes won’t tilt the machine. And when you’re woken up at 4am to deal with an outage or your sluggish site is costing millions in losses, the blame game and finger-pointing starts.

If you manage a startup …

Read the original article at Scale Quickly Like Birchbox – Startup Scalability 101

One of the great things about the Internet is how it has made it easier to put great ideas into practice. Whether the ideas are about improving people’s lives or a new way to sell and old-fashioned product, there’s nothing like a good little startup tale of creative disruption to deliver us from something old and tired.

We work with a lot of startup firms and we love being part of the atmosphere of optimism and ingenuity, peppered with a bit of youthful zeal - something very indie-rock-and-roll about it. But whether they are just starting out or already picking up pace every startup faces the same challenges to scale a business. Recently, we were reminded of this when we watched …

Database Administration and Management is as important under MySQL as it is under other enterprise database platforms such as Oracle or SQL Server.  Be proactive with your database operations, and avoid outage or loss of your most crucial data.

• MySQL Management and administration
• MySQL Performance, Optimization & tuning
• Remote Database Management
• Database monitoring & metrics collection
• MySQL Security Auditing
• Migrating applications and data to MySQL
• Migrating MySQL to the Amazon cloud
• Migrating MySQL to Amazon RDS
• Amazon RDS management & administration
• MySQL scalability
• Amazon RDS scalability
• MySQL High Availability
• MySQL Disaster Recovery
• Database Management & replication for highly available architectures
• Database security in the cloud …

Scalability is about application, architecture and infrastructure design, and careful management of server components.

1. Object Relational Mappers

ORMs are popular among developers but not among performance experts.  Why is that?  Primarily these two engineers experience a web application from entirely different perspectives.  One is building functionality, delivering features, and results are measured on fitting business requirements.  Performance and scalability are often low priorities at this stage.  ORMs allow developers to be much more productive, abstracting away the SQL difficulties of interacting with the backend datastore, and allowing them to concentrate on building the features and functionality.

On the performance side the picture is a bit different.  By leaving SQL query writing to an ORM, you are faced with complex queries that the database cannot optimize …

Read the original article at 5 Tips for Better Database Change Management

Deploying new code that includes changes to your database schema doesn't have to be a process fraught with stress and burned fingers. Follow these five tips and enjoy a good nights sleep.

1. Deploy with Roll Forward & Rollback Scripts

When developers check-in code that requires schema changes, that release should also require two scripts to perform database changes. One script will apply those changes, alter tables to add columns, change data types, seed data, clean data, create new tables, views, stored procedures, functions, triggers and so forth. A release should also include a rollback script, which would return tables to their previous state.

This idea of database change management is popular as Migrations …

1. This page or area of the website is very slow, why?

There are a lot of components that make up modern internet websites, and a lot of places to get stuck in the mud.  Website performance starts with the browser, what caching it is doing, their bandwidth to your server, what the webserver is doing (caching or not and how), if the webserver has sufficient memory, and then what the application code is doing and lastly how it is interacting with the backend database.

With all this complexity, it's no wonder so many sites struggle.  Typically these types of analysis start with some load testing, to stress test your setup, so you can watch for leaks.  Then some tools are applied to the webserver tier, and the database tier to see where the bottleneck lies.  It may be in the network …