Top 3 Questions From Clients
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.
Open Source Enables the Cloud
With the fast growth of virtualized data centers, and companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook, it's easy to forget how much is built on open-source components, aka commodity software. In a very real way open-source has enabled the huge explosion of commodity hardware, the fast growth of the internet itself, and now the further acceleration through cloud services, cloud infrastructure, and virtualization of data centers.
Your typical internet stack and application now stands on the shoulders of tens of thousands of open source developers and projects. Let's look at a few of them.
Cloud for Burst Capacity
One very strong case for cloud computing is that it can satisfy applications with seasonal traffic patterns. One way to test the advantages of the cloud is through a hybrid approach.
Cloud infrastructure can be built completely through scripts. You can spinup specific AMIs or machine images, automatically install and update packages, install your credentials, startup services, and you're running.
All of these steps can be performed in advance of your need at little cost. Simply build and test. When you're finished, shutdown those instances. What you walk away with is scripts. What do we mean?
The power here is that you carry zero costs for that burst capacity until you need it. You've already build the automation scripts, and have them in place. When your capacity planning warrants it, spinup additional compute power, and watch your internet application scale horizontally. Once your busy season is over, scale back and disable your usage until you need it again.
Book Review – Rework
Rework is chock full of ideas
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson's new book REWORK is one of the best startup business books I've read since Alan Weiss' Million Dollar Consulting. If you're already a fan of their signal vs noise blog, you'd be familiar with their terse style. Sharp and to the point.
Which is why you can pick it up and read it in a few hours. You'll want to because it's well written and pared down to essentials. In fact the book reads like their workflow advice, less mass, do it yourself, cut out the fat, concentrate on essentials. As such they are clearly practicing what they preach, which I like.
8 Questions to ask an AWS Expert
If you're headhunting a cloud computing expert, specifically someone who knows Amazon Web Services (AWS) and EC2, you'll want to have a battery of questions to ask them to assess their knowledge. As with any technical interview focus on concepts and big picture. As the 37Signals folks like to say "hire for attitude, train for skill". Absolutely!
The New Commodity Hardware Craze aka Cloud Computing
Does anyone remember 15 years ago when the dot-com boom was just starting? A lot of companies were running on Sun. Sun was the best hardware you could buy for the price. It was reliable and a lot of engineers had experience with the operating system, SunOS a flavor of Unix.
Yet suddenly companies were switching to cheap crappy hardware. The stuff failed more often, had lower quality control, and cheaper and slower buses. Despite all of that, cutting edge firms and startups were moving to commodity hardware in droves. Why was it so?
7 Ways to Troubleshoot MySQL
MySQL databases are great work horses of the internet. They back tons of modern websites, from blogs and checkout carts, to huge sites like Facebook. But these technologies don't run themselves. When you're faced with a system that is slowing down, you'll need the right tools to diagnose and troubleshoot the problem. MySQL has a huge community following and that means scores of great tools for your toolbox. Here are 7 ways to troubleshoot MySQL.
5 Ways to Avoid EC2 Outages
1. Backup outside of the Cloud
Some of the high profile companies affected by Amazon's April 2011 outage could have recovered had they kept a backup of their entire site outside of the cloud. With any hosting provider, managed traditional data center or cloud provider, alternate backups are always a good idea. A MySQL logical backup and/or incremental backup can be copied regularly offsite or to an alternate cloud provider. That's real insurance!
3 Ways to Boost Cloud Scalability
Deploying in the Amazon cloud is touted as a great way to achieve high scalability while paying only for the computing power you use. How do you get the best scalability from the technology?
Sean Hull
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