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allspaw

Agile Executive Podcast

by allspaw on February 12, 2010

Yesterday I was on a podcast with Andrew Shafer and Michael Coté, and we talked about development and operations cooperation. I rambled a bit, like I tend to do.

Andrew brought up something that’s disturbing, and I’ve seen elsewhere, which is that after seeing our presentation last year at Velocity, some folks decided that we somehow gave an endorsement to the idea of pushing your code whenever you want, and let the ‘ops guys’ deal with whatever comes as a result. Which isn’t at all what we suggested, and pretty much against the ideas of cooperation and communication between the dev and ops teams. I talk a bit about this in the podcast.

You have to prove that pushing whenever you want is an ok (safe, secure, etc.) thing to do. And the minute you can’t prove it, and you decide to continue that way….IMHO: you’re doing it wrong. :)

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I’ve been helping out a friend for some years with running a decent-size discussion forum. It’s running on a little (512mb of RAM) dedicated server and it’s outgrown the box it’s on. It needs to move to a new machine, which is all ready to take it.

Problem is, it’s in a twisty-maze of dependencies. It’s running FUDforum 2.6.4RC1, on MySQL 3.23, on RedHat 9 (!). It needs to somehow get backed up, moved, and upgraded to latest FUDforum (3.0.0) and MySQL 5, on the new machine.

It’s not 100% straightforward, needs someone who’s done this before, and someone who isn’t me, because of the new job and all.

If you know someone who can help out, please email me where my email address is jallspaw which is located on a server whose domain name is yahoo.com.

Thanks!

UPDATE: I found a guy.  And he’s great with FUDForum. Excellent!  Thanks all those who emailed!

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Deployment is just a part of dev/ops cooperation, not the whole thing

December 12, 2009

Dev/Ops is what some people are calling the renewed cross-interest in development and operations collaboration. Hammond and I spoke about it, and there was even a conference in Europe dedicated to it. While I do think that there’s still a lot more that is to be discussed around this idea of cooperation and mixing of [...]

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The epicenter of the web, and NYC

December 3, 2009

One of my apprehensions in moving to New York from San Francisco was a common concern: why would I move from the ‘epicenter’ of the web to a place where it’s not? There’s been lots written about startup hub cities, and innovative web metro areas, but the fact of the matter is that New York [...]

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From one door to another

November 18, 2009

Last week I gave 2 month’s notice – I’ll be leaving Flickr in January.
When Stew and Cat asked me to join Flickr in January of 2005, I felt like it was time to go and do something different, so I said yes.
Five years (and four billion photos) later, it’s again time to go and do [...]

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How Complex Systems Fail: A WebOps Perspective

November 12, 2009

I guess I’m late on getting to this, but How Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook is excellent.
Let me start with this: I don’t think I can overstate how right-on this paper is, with respect to the challenges, solutions, observations, and concerns involved with operating a medium to large web infrastructure. I found this via [...]

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When you deploy: your internal monologue

October 7, 2009

The minimum cycle of questions you should be asking yourself. As brought up by @debuggist and @benjaminblack.

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Meanwhile: More Meta-Metrics

October 5, 2009

Like all sane web organizations, we gather metrics about our infrastructure and applications. As many metrics as we can, as often as we can. These metrics, given the right context, helps us figure out all sorts of things about our application, infrastructure, processes, and business. Things such as…
What:
…did we do before (historical trending, etc)
…is going [...]

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WebOps: Good prep for becoming a new parent?

September 29, 2009

I think I’ve said before somewhere that working in the field of web operations prepared me somewhat for being a parent. I thought the other day that I should write down some of this reasoning, because it’s pretty often that I’m reminded of similarities:
High availability
Having redundant infrastructure is WebOps 101. For my kids’ most prized [...]

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Automated Control paper by the RAD Lab folks

August 1, 2009

Wow, how did I miss this until now? In June, some smart people gathered in Barcelona for the First Workshop on Automated Control for Datacenters and Clouds (ACDC09) and jeez it looked like it was a good time, from a glance at the program.
One of the cooler papers is “Automatic exploration of datacenter performance regimes” in [...]

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