Devops + Cloud Solutions Architect
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 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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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 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 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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Object Relational Mappers or ORMs are a layer of software that sits between web developers and the database backend. For instance if you’re using Ruby as your web development language, you’ll interact with MySQL through an ORM layer called ActiveRecord. If you’re using Java, you may be fond of the ORM called Hibernate. ORMs have …
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There’s lots of debate about exactly what constitutes “big” when talking about big data. Technical folks may be inclined to want a specific number. But when most CTOs and operations managers are talking about big data, they mean data warehouse and analytics databases. Data warehouses are unique in that they are tuned to run large …
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Look at your website’s current traffic patterns, pageviews or visits per day, and compare that to your server infrastructure. In a nutshell your current capacity would measure the ceiling your traffic could grow to, and still be supported by your current servers. Think of it as the horsepower of you application stack – load balancer, …
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Stress testing applications is like putting a car through crash tests, wear and tear tests, and performance tests. It’s about finding the leaks, and bottlenecks before they become a limitation to growth. In fact, stress testing is a big part of capacity planning. There are a few different ways to stress test a web application. …
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Caching keeps frequently accessed objects, images and data closer to where you need them, speeding up access to websites you hit often. Your browser is the first layer of caching, keeping images and data from websites that you visit often. Next the webserver itself has a caching layer, typically implemented by something like memcache, caching …
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