When I ran our setup on an instance the other day, I noticed how it failed with a “package not found” (or similar) error. After debugging this a bit, we discovered that Karmic moved from “archive.ubuntu.com” to “old-releases.ubuntu.com” (Probably diskspace or something — but who knows? :-)). And because the sources pointed to the former, it broke the bootstrap process on new and existing EC2 instances and Vagrant VMs for us....
Cloud, everybody wants it, some actually use it. So what’s my take away from AWS’ recent outtage? Background So first off, we had two pieces of our infrastructure failing (three if we include our Multi-AV RDS) — both of which involve EBS. Numero uno One of those pieces in my immediate reach was a MySQL server, which we use to keep sessions. And to say the least about AWS and in their defense, the instance had run for almost 550 days and had never given us much or any reason to let us down....
Ever since I started playing around with Unix ~13 years ago, I’ve been a fan of automating things. What started out as writing little (maybe pointless) shell scripts slowly but surely morphed into infrastructure automation today. As for my, or maybe anyone’s, motivation to do these things, I see three main factors: I’m easily bored — because repeating things is dull. I’m easily distracted (when I’m bored). I’m German: Of course we strive for perfection and excellence....
In 2010, operations became an even more central part of my life. As I write this blog post (in early January, 2011), we have been running on Amazon AWS — and EC2 in particular — for over a year. Previously we had used a service called RightScale but in Q3 of 2010, we moved on/away from RightScale and started using chef and a service called Scalarium. Because Opscode’s chef became such a big part of my work life, I gave a talk about chef, and chef-solo in particular, at last December’s PHP Usergroup meeting in Berlin....
A couple months ago, I wrote an article titled Operation CouchDB. I noticed that a lot of people still visit my blog for this particular post, so this is an update to the situation. And no, you may not copy and paste this or any other of my blog posts unless you ask me. ;-) Caching revisited A while back I wrote about how caching is trivial with CouchDB — well sort of....