Distributed MySQL Sleuthing on the Wire
Intro Oftentimes you need to know what MySQL is doing right now and furthermore if you are handling heavy traffic you probably have multiple instances of it running across many nodes. I’m going to...
View ArticlePercona Live 2012 – The Etsy Shard Architecture
I attended Percona Conf in Santa Clara last week. It was a great 3 days of lots of people dropping expert MySQL knowledge. I learned a lot and met some great people. I gave a talk about the Etsy shard...
View ArticleUsing the New “load_recipe” Chef Function with Shef
If you are developing chef recipes it really helps to use the command line tool called shef. Shef is just a REPL to run chef in an interactive ruby session. If you haven’t ever tried it, you can find...
View ArticleDevelopment is Production Too
I was at OSCON this week, and my friend Erik Kastner and I did a talk about development environments. Specifically what to avoid and how to keep environments consistent across development and...
View ArticleProxying Your iPad/iPhone Through OpenVPN
Intro It comes up often how to connect to our office openvpn network using an iPad or iPhone. On OSX its pretty simple, use Viscosity or Tunnelblick. But to my knowledge there is nothing like that for...
View ArticleLooking Under the Covers of StatsD
Intro StatsD is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers. Packets are then sent to one or more pluggable backend services. The default...
View ArticleQuick Tip: Find the QEMU VM to Virtual Interface Mapping
The other day we were getting some messages on our network switch that a host was flapping between ports. It turns out we had two virtual hosts on different machines using the same MAC address (not...
View ArticleDitching Vino for X11vnc
I’d been using gnome vino as a VNC server for years on my media computer. This way I can use touchpad to control it from my iPad. It works fine, but a little bit clunky and badly documented, plus its...
View ArticleBuilding Your Own Cloud From Scratch
Intro There are a lot of private cloud solutions out there with great things built into them already to complete a full cloud stack – networking, dashboards, storage, and a framework that puts all the...
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Ganglia Grill Graphs
One of my favorite things to do (other than stare at a computer all day) is to cook. I recently bought a new smoker grill, and quickly realized that I was running outside the entire day to tune the...
View ArticleCrossing the Production Barrier: Development at Scale
Slides from my talk at Percona 2013 Crossing the Production Barrier: Development at Scale from jgoulah
View ArticleCapturing A/V Multimedia Streams From the Browser
Background I’ve recently been working on finishing up an application to help gather presentation feedback when demo’ing a talk for the first time in front of a live audience. The app will play back a...
View ArticleStubbing AFNetworking Calls In XCode Unit Tests
Intro A unit test by definition of testing the smallest possible part of the application, should eliminate all dependencies from the systems its interacting with. This in turn will remove any unknown...
View ArticleDynamically Update Hypervisor Guest Info in Chef With Rehai
Introduction It turns out this little tool is long overdue, as simple of a concept as it is, but also easy to misunderstand the use cases for, ours at Etsy however was very targeted. Several years ago...
View ArticleGo Deployment
Intro In the spirit of the recent re-release of Deployinator, it seems timely to write a little bit about deployment. However, this is not a how-to on writing a Deployinator stack, but an overview of...
View ArticleRunning Strace in Docker
I’ve been reverse engineering a new application setup and seemed like an appropriate place to try out docker. Spinning up a lightweight and reproducible environment is the goal and containerization is...
View ArticleConfiguring Chef for Provisioning
If you’re working with infrastructure its good practice to describe it using code so that it is reproducible and consistent across servers and development environments. I’ve used Chef for quite some...
View ArticleWhy You Should Point Staging to Your Production Database
I have been thinking about this topic more recently as I’ve just started working with a new infrastructure, and one of the things that I noticed is the staging database is a separate copy of the...
View ArticleApproximate Times to Update an RDS Instance
Here’s a quick overview from an upgrade a couple months ago of an RDS instance type db.t2.medium to type db.r3.large. In addition to changing the instance type, we upgraded the disk from 64GB to 100GB,...
View ArticleProvisioning Docker Containers With Chef
I’ll be totally honest in saying even though the Dockerfile is the supported way to build docker images, I have not quite bought into building my containers using the format. I believe the main thing...
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