Sean Hull's Scalable Startups » Website Basics

5 Tips to Cache Websites and Boost Speed

Sean Hull — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 19:00:49 +0000

Read the original article at 5 Tips to Cache Websites and Boost Speed

Often when we think about speeding up and scaling, we focus on the application layer itself. We look at the webserver tier, and database tier, and optimize the most resource intensive pages. There’s much more we can do to speed things up, if we only turn over the right stones. Whether you’re using WordPress or [...]

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Software Unit Testing – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 20:28:18 +0000

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Software development is composed of individual components. As developers are building these units, they build tests to verify them for correctness. These tests can verify the environment, they can verify data, they can verify edge cases and include test harnesses. In essence they verify that the code meets the design specification. There are a few [...]

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Amazon Web Services – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:25:13 +0000

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Amazon Web Services is a division of Amazon the bookseller, but this part of the business is devoted solely to infrastructure and internet servers. These are the building blocks of data centers, the workhorses of the internet. AWS’s offering of Cloud Computing solutions allows a business to setup or “spinup” in the jargon of cloud [...]

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IOPs – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:31:58 +0000

Read the original article at IOPs – What is it and why is it important?

IOPs are an attempt to standardize comparison of disk speeds across different environments. When you turn on a computer, everything must be read from disk, but thereafter things are kept in memory. However applications typically read and write to disk frequently. When you move to enterprise class applications, especially relational databases, a lot of disk [...]

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Extract Transform & Load – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 23:51:47 +0000

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So-called ETL relates to moving data from external sources into and out of relational databases or data warehouses. Extract Source systems may store data in an infinite variety of formats. Extracting involves getting that data into common files for moving to the destination system. CSV file also known as comma separated values is named because [...]

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Service Monitoring – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 17:11:09 +0000

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Data centers are complex beasts, and no amount of operator monitoring by itself can keep track of everything. That’s why automated monitoring is so important. So what should you monitor? You can divide up your monitoring into a couple of strategic areas. Just as with metrics collection, there is business & application level monitoring and [...]

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Point-in-time Recovery – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 20:50:47 +0000

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Web-facing database servers receive a barrage of activity 24 hours a day. Sessions are managed for users logging in, ratings are clicked and comments are added. Even more complex are web-based ecommerce applications. All of this activity is organized into small chunks called transactions. They are discrete sets of changes. If you’re editing a word [...]

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Data warehousing – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 21:43:44 +0000

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A data warehouse is a special type of database. It is used to store large amounts of data, such as analytics, historical, or customer data, and then build large reports and data mining against it. It is markedly different from a web-facing or high-transaction database, which typically has many many small transactions or pieces of [...]

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Migrating to the Cloud – Why and why not?

Sean Hull — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 05:03:36 +0000

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A lot of technical forums and discussions have highlighted the limitations of EC2 and how it loses on performance when compared to physical servers of equal cost. They argue that you can get much more hardware and bigger iron for the same money. So it then seems foolhardy to turn to the cloud. Why this [...]

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Semi-Synchronous Replication – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 19:39:58 +0000

Read the original article at Semi-Synchronous Replication – What is it and why is it important?

Replication in MySQL allows you to copy and replay changes from your primary database to an alternate backup or slave database. This facility in MySQL is an asynchronous process, which means it does not happen at the time it occurs on the primary. It could happen a second later, or minutes later. In fact sometimes [...]

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Migration to MySQL – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 14:40:25 +0000

Read the original article at Migration to MySQL – What is it and why is it important?

MySQL is a relational database that backs many internet websites and enterprise applications. Like all enterprise software, it has a whole complement of features which are well documented, such as data types, storage engines, transactional behaviors and so forth. It also has a set of processes, many of which involve how software operates on Linux [...]

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Root Cause Analysis – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 13:00:08 +0000

Read the original article at Root Cause Analysis – What is it and why is it important?

Root Cause Analysis is the means to identify the ultimate source and cause of an outage. When an outage occurs that causes serious downtime of a website, typically organizations are in crisis mode. Urgency of resolution sometimes pushes aside due process, change management and general caution. Root Cause Analysis attempts to as much as possible [...]

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Offsite Backups – What are they and why are they important?

Sean Hull — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 14:14:40 +0000

Read the original article at Offsite Backups – What are they and why are they important?

Backups are obviously an important part of any managed infrastructure deployment. Computing systems are inherently fallible, through operator error or hardware failure. Existing systems must be backed up, from configurations, software and media files, to the backend data store. In a managed hosting environment or cloud hosting environment, it is convenient to use various filesystem [...]

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Database Replication – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 16:15:07 +0000

Read the original article at Database Replication – What is it and why is it important?

Database replication is a service for shipping changes to your database, off to a copy housed on another server, potentially even in another data center. Each change to the records of information in your database or groups of them are organized into transactions. These each get unique identifiers or change numbers. Those groupings of changes [...]

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Behavior Driven Development – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 10:30:19 +0000

Read the original article at Behavior Driven Development – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull discusses on Quora – What is Behavior Driven Development? Related posts:Decoupling – What is it and why is it important? Agile – What is it and why is it important? Open Source – What is it and why is it important? Devops – What is it and why is it important? Object Relational [...]

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Infrastructure Provisioning – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 13:31:21 +0000

Read the original article at Infrastructure Provisioning – What is it and why is it important?

In the old days… You would have a closet in your startup company with a rack of computers. Provisioning involved: Deciding on your architectural direction, what, where & how Ordering the new hardware Waiting weeks for the packages to arrive Setup the hardware, wire things together, power up Discover some component is missing, or failed [...]

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Data Spot Checks – What are they and why are they important?

Sean Hull — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 06:00:33 +0000

Read the original article at Data Spot Checks – What are they and why are they important?

Loading data into a database whether it is Oracle or MySQL, involves passing a lot of hurdles. If you’re working with CSV files, special characters may cause trouble, end of line characeters, very long lines, and so forth. Once your data load is complete, spot checks involve basic checks to determine that all went well. [...]

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Relational Database – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:31:47 +0000

Read the original article at Relational Database – What is it and why is it important?

A relational database is the warehouse of your data. Your crown jewels. It’s your excel spreadsheet or filing cabinet writ large. You use them everyday and may not know it. Your smartphone stores it’s contact database in a relational database, most likely sqlite – the ever present but ever invisible embedded database platform. Your online [...]

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Database Change Management – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 13:00:35 +0000

Read the original article at Database Change Management – What is it and why is it important?

During the software development process, whether you’re cutting edge Agile developers, or traditional waterfall method folks, your code changes are periodically accompanied by database changes. For instance tables have particular rows and columns. When developers add new columns (ie fields on an index card), or create new tables, relationships, indexes or other database objects, all [...]

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Business Continuity Planning – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 13:00:53 +0000

Read the original article at Business Continuity Planning – What is it and why is it important?

BCP or BCRP if you want to also include “resiliency” in the acronym, basically outlines planning for the worst. In the old days you had a filing cabinet with documents, for example there might be a central government office which houses birth certificates or titles and deeds. Perhaps a copy of documents is regularly created, [...]

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Query Profiling – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 13:00:34 +0000

Read the original article at Query Profiling – What is it and why is it important?

Queries are so-named because of the lovely language we call SQL – simplified query language. That’s a bit of sarcasm on my part, I’ve never found it particularly simple or elegant. Profiling them involves finding how they are spending their time, and what they are asking the server to do. In this way you can [...]

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NOSQL Database – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 16:34:31 +0000

Read the original article at NOSQL Database – What is it and why is it important?

NOSQL is a sort of all-encompassing term which includes very simple key/value databases like Memcache, along with more sophisticated non-relational databases such as Mongodb and Cassandra. Relational databases have been around since the 70′s so they’re a very mature technology. In general they support transactions allowing you to make changes to your data in discrete, [...]

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Performance Metrics – What are they and why are they important?

Sean Hull — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:51:10 +0000

Read the original article at Performance Metrics – What are they and why are they important?

In order to understand how fast your website is, we need some numbers. We call these fancy numbers performance metrics, objective measures that we can track over time. We can track them for seasonality as well as website traffic and growth. But we can also track them for feature and application changes based on deployments [...]

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Agile – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 11:16:38 +0000

Read the original article at Agile – What is it and why is it important?

Agile software development seeks a more lightweight methodology of making changes and releases to software. In the traditional, incremental approach, large pieces of software are written at once, and releases happen less frequently. Once features are complete, the testing phase happens, and then deployment to production. These releases can happen over many weeks in time, [...]

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Sharding – What is it and why is it important?

Sean Hull — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 09:45:48 +0000

Read the original article at Sharding – What is it and why is it important?

Sharding is a way of partitioning your datastore to benefit from the computing power of more than one server. For instance many web-facing databases get sharded on user_id, the unique serial number your application assigns to each user on the website. Sharding can bring you the advantages of horizontal scalability by dividing up data into [...]

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