Some thoughts on outtages

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....

April 23, 2011 · 8 min

Getting the most out of Chef with Scalarium and vagrant

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....

March 9, 2011 · 3 min