Hosted MySQL: Amazon RDS (and backups)

Among all the different technologies in our stack, we also use MySQL. While we still run MySQL (or Percona-Server) ourselves, we selected a managed solution to power parts of our production infrastructure: a Multi-AZ setup with Amazon’s RDS. AZ is Amazon-speak for “availability zone”, essentially a datacenter. RDS stands for: Relational Database Service. Judging from my experience with our own setups where EBS is in the mix, I have to say that Amazon does an outstanding job hiding these potential issues with RDS from us....

March 17, 2012 · 8 min

Subversion dumps

This week, we just had it. The current provider we pay to host our subversion repositories is just unbearable, and so we decided to move (on) to [Unfuddle][3]. Our reason to move to Unfuddle is that they offer everything we need (and more, e.g. Git), at a pretty good price. I also heard Unfuddle a 100 times when I shopped for a recommendation. And on top of all the features, they also kick butt at support and for example offered to import our repositories right away....

July 18, 2009 · 2 min

Drobo with DroboShare on XP, Vista, MacOSX, Ubuntu

I bought a Drobo for myself about seven months ago and I couldn’t be any happier. My files are backed up on a RAID system, I still got plenty of space to waste. My world is OK. Some friends of mine recently bought one of the new Drobo units with a DroboShare. The DroboShare costs $200 (USD) and is a glorified Linux server which exports your Drobo using Samba to all clients on the network....

January 17, 2009 · 3 min