Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

This was not a CloudCamp !

Don't get me wrong, it was a great event and I met lots of interesting people , but it was not a *camp.
The idea was there to have an unconference after the formal sessions, but the formal sessions ran out and there was no time because of food and bar duties.

The event was a mixture of regular Belgian Campers, Virtualization geeks, Open Source folks , obviously there were a couple of "lost" americans , and the crowd from up North :)

The location was weird to say the least, what if the boat hat floated off on the river :)

It's obvious the world doesn't have a fixed definition for "Cloud Computing" yet , Tarry really made a safe bet by cut and pasting the definition from WikiPedia but the thing that really worried me was that when Raph asked if the audience could define Open Source they couldn't either.

Given the audience it's really hard to understand why they couldn't explain what Open Source is .. they should be able to. As the biggest chunk of Cloud Infrastructure is based on Open Source , the audience of a CloudCamp should be able to define Open Source, but then again there was quite a number of suits around that weren't expected to understand what it is all about :)

The fact is that a the cloud today still is a bit of undefined, different marketeers are grabbing the opportunity to rebrand their longtime existing product as fresh and hot cloud.

The interesting part of the Cloud to me is the mix of Virtualization, Scalability, Automation , Large Scale Deployment , playing the puppetmaster, and High Availability ..

It's stuff I have been doing for ages , it's the stuff this blog has been covering since the beginning ... but I don't plan on renaming my blog .. as afterall the whole cloud issue is just a Freaking DNS Problem

Pictures of the event are here

I probably ranted a bit too much on the marketing push that Sun has been trying to make into the Open Source community.
The economical situation isn't really perfect so Sun does deserve some credit too.

Yesterday Techcrunch published an exclusive interview with Jonathan Schwartz on the future of Sun and how Sun will be rescued .

[YouTube Movie Embedded]

More details are here

or timebound ? or don't you have any load on your DB at all ?

I personally don't see many reasons to virtualize your database, apart from the , we plan to start small and scale out, or the we need it now and we don't have the hardware yet , putting your database on a virtual platform where you have to share resources with other virtual machines doesn't really sound like a tempting proposition to me. Small, almost idle databases , maybe. But enterprise production level databases no thnx.

Sheeri Cabral also mentions the above reasons .. and there also .. Enterprise Production use isn't listed.

Databases typically require a good amount of memory , and steady disk access.
So if you are in a production environment with a fairly loaded database, would you want a 4Gb machine with full direct memory access, Or 3.5Gb of virtual memory that can be ballooned to 3 if underused. My pick is at the 4Gb real memory.

The original article at Sun argues the use of Virtual Harddisk to move around workloads between different servers or even Virtualization platforms. But it fails to describe the guaranteed performance penalty of not using raw disks but a filesystem on top of a loopback device. How many layers do you want before actually write to the disks. Good practice in a virtual environment is to dedicate full disks or LVM parts to the virtual machine hence lowering the overhead, but most (default) setups do the opposite.

And don't get me started about the myth of using virtualization for high-availability :)

Now can somebody please remove all the clueless marketing people from planetmysql.org , thnx. (they can be identified with by a blogs.sun.com source and posts that mainly talk about Sun products including only a slight hint to MySQL)

(PS. What's a Market Development Engineer's job description anyhow ? , that's just a different name for Marketing Assistant right ?)

After the O'Reilly GMT interview , the nice folks over at Tikitag sent me a Tikitag presskit to play with. I actually got it about 2 weeks ago but I only got like 5 minutes of time with it earlier. Just time to find the Linux Client and get that to connect to their site. So far so good ... I however couldn't get a connection between my reader and the client. The readers' led was constantly on.

So today I connected the reader to my Fedora based Dell Laptop, I figured out the content of the Debian package and copied those files (a startupscript and a jar file to my laptop)

The led started flashing gently. I restarted pcscd , started the client and the Java client detected the reader , I launched the Tikitag Dashboard but that failed to detect the reader till after I restarted my firefox.

From there on I could map tags to url's etc. So now I have a bunch of Tikitagged Businesscards.

So my next step is to figure out why it isn't working on my EEE. Because after all the EEE is what I carry around when going to conferences and other places .. which is when I might want to actually use the TikiTag reader. (Any ideas anyone ?)

There is a lot of potential for this kind of technology.. Imagine using it in a museum where you get a tagreader equipped device which you can use to read information about the artworks you are about to see.

I didn't even have time to finish my post about the Puppet Podcast and DevMinistration before John had already posted his chat with Matt as recorded yesterday in Eindhoven.

I'm glad I could bring these guys together ! Great stuff !

In his CloudCafe 18 Podcast John talks about Puppet to Luke and they coin the idea of Devministration

I really like the terminology, so I`m a devministrator, and probably the bigger part of Inuits are Devministrators.

The first stage in becoming a devministrator is using version control, then bugtracking .. etc.
Coming from an era where I was the sysadmin pushing the developers to use version control this sounds really strange to me..
Yes I had to convince developers to use version control, while Luke thinks he needs to convince sysadmins to use version control.
Weird.. other continent, other habits, but the important part is we all use it.

But the big part is that we don't spend our time managing servers, but rather scripting the automation of the management. Learning machines how they should manage our configs and automate.

Like the old Google saying, you have to automate yourself out of a job every 18 months.

Guess that's also what ad Devministrator is.

Don't forget .. this thursday : CloudCamp Brussels !

So what happens when you run into a guy wearing a Barcamp ESM cap, an OpenNMS shirt and a Zenoss jacket. You ask him how he got all that stuff .

It seems to be pretty easy ..
Let see if it works for mee too :)

So Tarus and Mark , do you already have my snail mail address ? :)

Oh and Matt, we need some openQRM gear too :)

It was fun, the good part about T-Dose is that is small enough to actually be able to speak with everybody you want to .. well almost .. there were still some people around I wanted to talk to but I didn't get the chance to . Specially Ber Kessels and Roy Scholten who filled in the gaps in the Drupal track. After my own talk I had to run to the other track so I could answer the tricky questions in our other talk about Open Source Monitoring Tools. And I never really made it back to the Drupal room. So Ber, Roy , next time you run into me I`ll buy you a Beer !

Anyway Pics are up (so Geert now finally has pictures of himself on stage)

Social event pic is also up ..

Slides (Drupal/ Virtualization) were already up

Somehow I had problems seeing al the sessions I wanted to see this year. lots of interesting things happening at the same time and therefore forcing me to choose for specific sessions. JP and Jeroen already announced they will be there again next year .. I just hope to have a better planned Drupal track then ...

T-Dose kind of concluded my current scheduled list of talks , I`m looking for new interesting conference venues to visit .. specially in southern Europe .. so if anybody has ideas :)

Alan just coined WholeSale HA. The idea of rebooting a whole virtual machine rather than just failing over 1 service.

He wants to have the best of both worlds in 1 framework, he however doesn't specify what parts he likes from the WholeSale HA setup

Yes you want to use it coupled with hardware predictive failure analysis tools. In order to achieve Higher Availabilty, but I don't think the WholeSale HA part is real HA.

WholeSale HA isn't going to be fast enough for most of the business critical environments.
You simply cannot afford to reboot or even boot a full machine and the related downtime that brings for your service.

So yes a best effort combination, but with a strong focus on the application state would be preferred. WholeSale is a good start .. but it's definitely not where you want to stop.