Joe Williams discusses how distributed systems, cloud computing and automated configuration management affect system’s availability. He exemplifies with a database service built on CouchDB, Erlang, Chef, all running on EC2.
Puppet Labs released a command-line interface & set of APIs last week, called Faces, that allows sysadmins to create or extend subcommands and actions for Puppet. The API is callable from Ruby and includes objects that expose Puppet’s internal subsystem. Sysadmins can access Puppet objects like report to create, display and submit reports, and catalog to compile, save, view and convert catalogs.
FlightCaster recently open sourced Crane, a tool for distributing and remotely controlling Clojure instances, currently specialized for EC2. Incanter is a Clojure library and tool that makes R-like statistical computations easy with Clojure. Also: the build and dependency management tool Leiningen 1.0 is now available.
Managing libraries and dependencies is tedious. Clojars is a new hosted repository for Clojure libraries inspired by Ruby Gems and Gemcutter. Together with a new build tool, Leiningen, Clojars takes the pain out of library management. InfoQ talked to Alex Osborne about Clojars and how it works.
There has been a lot of conversation going on around the configuration of applications, and how to manage it. This article explores things people can do from within their code to make their lives, and the lives of anyone else who has to administer or maintain their application, easier. These patterns have been used a number of times on ThoughtWorks projects, and they have proven their worth.
In this case study, the pattern of automatic processes interlaced with human intervention provided bwin with an instrument to raise process efficiency in CM drastically. Furthermore, successes of the incorporation of human factors into change management was an increased visibility and appreciation of the context and importance of change amongst team members and stakeholders across the company.
For years the norm for developers was to work in an iterative and incremental manner but for database developers to work in a more serial manner. The predominance of evolutionary development methods make it clear that the two groups need to work in the same manner to be productive as a team. Pramod presents material from "Refactoring Databases " on implementing evolutionary database development.
In this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008, Dan Farino, Chief Systems Architect at MySpace, talked about administering thousands of web servers from a system’s architect viewpoint. He mostly detailed the performance counter monitoring used by MySpace, the system profiler and the system administration site demoing the tools for the audience to see how it works.
In this interview taken by InfoQ’s Ryan Slobojan, Dan Farino, Chief Systems Architect at MySpace, talks about the system architecture and the challenges faced when building a very large online community. Because MySpace is built almost entirely on the .NET Framework, Dan explains how a .NET product scales on hundreds of servers.
