Twice in one day I was pointed to The Mantra .. the vision , the good practices on how to run an infrastructure. And because I fully agree with this way of runing an infrastructure I`ll highlight some of them again .

• Design For Change , the google way.. everything will be different the next time you look around
• Be reproducable , you have to be able to survive the 10th floor test .. yes even when building stuff
• Design Redundancy upfront , don't try to squeeze it in later .. it will be more expensive and you will be less flexible
• ...

Dormando has some more reading material.
And when you are done reading Go watch the video of Randy Shoups presentation on Amazon's infrastructure, because also at Amazon we can find 4 repeatedly discussed points in the Architectural strategy

• Partition Everything
• Automate Everything
• Async Everything
• Prepare for Failure

It's a repeating theme , with variations based on your specific problem domain.. but the central toughts stay the same.

Automate Everything




Expect Failure

Matt , we've arguing open standards , W3C compliance and , no flash , java or any other plugin requirements for basic functionality for over a decade now. Those people just don't listen .. they only know IE and their customers / bosses only know IE.

Telling them there is a whole other world out there that is not running on windows doesn't matter for them as they don't see revenue from them. (Chicken, Egg)

The argument that does work however is :

"Hey I just tried looking at your site while waiting for this meeting and it didn't work, does it work on your phone ?"

People will start to care about not being able to have basic functionality from their phone.

Paper makes me waste time .. actually signed papers make me waste even more time. Papers that have to be signed are always on a stack waiting to be signed posted ..

So whenever someone sends me a document that needs to be signed what happens is that it has to be printed, then signed, then I usually opt to scan the document and mail it back to the sender. Seems like not everybody thinks thats good enough so they want me to send the original docs also ..

Which means finding an envelope, figuring out how much stamps these things need, since usually it's not just a 1 page document but more pages than the average letter and off course most of these documents need to ge sent abroad.
Then I start realising I don't have any stamps at home...

Aahrr!

It seems like for the past 4 years February is the month that O'Reilly really loves me and decides to publish one of my articles.

This years version was cowritten together with my collegue Johan Huysmans and tackles the creation of Highly Available Gateways

Altough the every HA situation is different and this is a pretty easy setup it's a good start for other setups.

Enjoy the read

PS. Yes I know , in 2006 I also had a January article :)

This February I`ll be heading to my 8th Fosdem in row.

I went to every single Fosdem so far, some years only one day because of other obligations but I was a round most of the time
During the first couple of years I was pretty active in the FIT team, helping out people to find the right rooms , keeping the fosdem contributions safe with Sven, funding different social events and devroom dinners ,
Later I was in charge of the HPC and Cluster devroom in which we also held the openMosix summits.
And back in 2004 I replaced Moshe at the openMosix Summit standing in front of a great audience at the Janson room.

As Wim just pointed out the Drupal Devroom schedule is out
and it seems like 2008 will be the year that I have to rush my talk in order for the Drupal Devroom to close its doors on Sunday evening. I'll be sharing my knowledge on MySQL cluster with the Drupal crowd for them to learn and benefit from.

Lots of rumours about Yahoo wanting to dump a significant part of it's personnel have been overwhelmed by the new news that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo.

Let's stand still for 5 seconds to think about that impact :

First of all.. they are buying a lot of advertising and content , a field where they were currently losing market share. But they are buying more.

They are buying into the mindset of startups, Flickr, Upcoming, and others.. something they have long lost ..

Bort just made an interesting point in realising that in with Microsoft buying Yahoo, that would also include buying Zimbra, and lots of other open source technology. What about openID, will they make their own MS-OpenID ?

Will they make the same mistake they made when buying Hotmail ?

Will yahoo still need to let people go or will they leave themselves because of this ?
Lots of questions .. time will tell.

Christophe just proved it. I've been saying it for a while, I had a good idea about it .. but now we have mathematical proof.

I`m about 2 years ahead of the crowd.

And I wasn't even early on Last.FM I was using Pandora before that..

Slashdot pointed us to this guy who slightly modified his EEE :)
Now that's what we call hardware hacking.

Anyway .. the EEE is now the Nr1 item on my WishList !

Last century I was sometimes noticed to be using VMWare to run a weird platform on my Linux Desktop , or to run some test installations. With the introduction of Qemu and later Xen there was no need for me to use the proprietary closed alternative.

So I got the question earlier this week to build a virtual instance of our bootstrapping environment so that field engineers could take that virtual machine on their laptop and do installations from there.

One of the collegues told me that booting a fresh VMWare instance of the network would be no problem so I took up on the challenge.

First of all a registration procedure so the nice folks over at VMWare can spam me with their marketing stuff during the next couple of months. I needed to register as I seemed to need a Serial Number.. whow .. that was ages ago since I last needed such a beast.
A full 101Mb download later I had an RPM ready to be installed.

"Cool an RPM" I tought, that means that I will be able to clean up all the mess they leave behind with a simple rpm -e.
Wrong guess. it seems like VMWare starts copying around files in different places on your filesystem and actually even wants to compile stuff against your running kernel. All fine and well, but the result is a bunch of unidentified files that are cluttering my filesystem.

The next step required me to start the gui to create a virtual machine, suddenly the load of my machine skyrocketed. Load 11 whew.. yep the VMware process was the guilty one.. luckily it went back to normal after a while .. but I`m still not sure what happened there.

Click, click, click and before I knew it VMware was allocating 4Gb on myfilesystem for an empty VM. Noo.. don't allocate it yet.. retry.. ok .. take it when you need it .. that's better. And why do you think I only want 256Mb for this machine ? Hmm.. where's that config file.. aah.. clickerdy click again .

Start VM, F12 to boot of the network, wait, reboot done.

And thus we joined the era of transferring an unmanagable image that everyone will copy around wile slightly modifying things and never placing them in version control . hence ending up one day with something nobody knows how we got there..

What did we learn, that the way I bootstrap a Virtual machine or a physical machine really doesn't matter, and is still just a matter of mapping a MAC address to a HOSTNAME.

When working on the system, to check if the install was done correctly it felt like I was on a remotely bad connected machine, not really slow, but really slow but still (could have been because I logged on via the gui). Certainly not like the paravirtualized Xen machines I`m used to work with, more like the VirtualBox experience.

The big problem with giving someone an image to play with however is that you loose all control over what is being deployed , configured or changed and it just becomes a change management nightmare. At least reinstalling won't take much time.

But I`ll go back to KVM and Xen for my daily work.. I've seen enough GUI's for this month :)

Elise why ask if you can see already ?