PlanetMysql.ru - информация о СУБД MySQL » amazon

WordPress on S3: the beauty of simplicity

Artem Livshits — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:00:46 +0000

My first computer program was written almost quarter a century ago on a BK-0010 computer. It was very simple: the program asked the user to enter their name and then greeted the user using the entered name, like “Hello, Artem!”. I was fascinated. A couple of lines written in Vilnius BASIC transformed a piece of metal and silicon into a considerate thing that cared about a person’s name enough to remember it :-). Of course, the first experience doesn’t represent the day-to-day routine of software development, but the moments when I see a couple of lines making an amazing transformation still enchant me, and remind me why I’ve been writing code all this time.

I’ve just experienced this very same first-time feeling as we’ve released Yapixx – a picture sharing web application using the cloud storage. The most amazing thing about Yapixx is that we wrote very little code to make it happen: most of its functionality is provided by WordPress, which by the way we didn’t modify at all.

On one hand Yapixx is just WordPress, enhanced with plugins and configured to provide good picture sharing experience.

On the other hand, Yapixx has gone where WordPress could not go before – Yapixx runs completely on top of Amazon S3, using the enormous power of S3 to make serving the users’ pictures highly scalable and storing all data extremely durable.

As an engineer I’ve been on the never ending quest of finding new ways to do more with less. How do I write less code and provide more functional solution? How do I empower my customers to accomplish more with applying very little effort (or preferably no effort at all)? Yapixx is one of those gems – it shows how unbelievably simple it is to run a beautiful website on top of Amazon S3: you don’t need to learn new APIs, you don’t have to know how to write code, you don’t even have to know that you are relying on MySQL + ClouSE to store data reliably and securely in the cloud!

Yapixx is not a toy application: it’s a fully functional ready-to-run WordPress on Amazon S3. With a few clicks Yapixx can be transformed into anything WordPress can do, while storing all website content in Amazon S3. Just continue doing what you set to do with your Web site – to build a beautifully powerful representation of you, your company, and your cause.

Amazon S3 is a very powerful service designed for building one-of-a-kind massively distributed applications. This is its strength but it’s also its weakness: if you are not building one-of-a-kind massively distributed application, the low-level vendor-specific APIs and eventual consistency guarantees are just the unnecessary complexities that you pay for, but don’t use. WordPress is an example of how to make Amazon S3 a true cloud storage utility service that can be easily used by millions. It’s a people-oriented (as opposed to technology-oriented) approach to building a distributed system – as a constellation of beautiful websites powered by creativity and uniqueness of individuals, like the Internet itself is!

‘Nuff said :-). Get your own WordPress on S3 for free now.

Artem

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

CAOS Theory Podcast 2012.04.20

The 451 Group — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:10:50 +0000

Topics for this podcast:

*OpenStack, Amazon, Eucalyptus and Citrix engage in open cloud warfare
*Microsoft spins off new company for openness
*Updates on automation players Puppet Labs and Opscode with Chef
*Percona turns attention to MySQL high availability
*Open APIs as the fifth pillar of modern IT openness

iTunes or direct download (28:42, 4.9MB)

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

Amazon RDS for MySQL — Is it any good?

Anders Karlsson — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:10:00 +0000

We have been testiing the MySQL RDS Service from Amazon here at RF, and so far it looks good for what we use MySQL for. We don't have that much data left in MySQL though, but some of the services are still mission critical, and we have had a couple running on RDS for a week or so.

I have to say I am pretty happy so far, but there are a couple of things you should know before you get to use the services. To begin with, you don't get a proper MySQL root account, i.e. no SUPER privileges. No big deal I guess, but this means there are a few things you cannot do. I was planning to migrate off the EC2 based server to RDS by setting up the RDS service as a slave, and then switching to the RDS service, but as SUPER privilege is required for CHANGE MASTER TO, I could not do this. And before you ask: Amazon DOES support slaves among the RDS servers, but this is set up using their own methods. Easy to use, yes, but not as flexible as the real thing.

As for parameters, you can modify a bunch of them, but not all. I have to benchmark performance here eventually, but it has been sufficient for our modest MySQL needs so far, so I might not even do that. I also have to check what parameters I am allowed to modify and which I can't in some more detail also, to figure out if there is anything significant missing.

So far though, I think the conclusion is that this is a great service for people with low / medium requirements in terms of MySQL. Backup and snapshots are a breeze and are automated, cross availability zone use is also an option (not tested by me though). The server is accessed just like any other service, so you can set up Route 53 with a more reasonable name to point to it, if you wish. Which nodes can access the server is also controlled by you, both the service itself controlling what can access it, and by the usual MySQL GRANTs.

When we get more servers running on RDS, I'll let you know more.

Cheers
/Karlsson

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

Open APIs are the new open source

The 451 Group — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:08:58 +0000

We’ve seen the rise of open source software in the enterprise and also beyond the IT industry, but the real keys to openness and its advantages in today’s technology world — where efficient use of cloud computing and supporting services are paramount — exist in open application programming interfaces, or APIs.

Open source software continues to be a critical part of software development, systems administration, IT operations and more, but much of the action in leveraging modern cloud computing and services-based infrastructures centers on APIs. Open APIs are the new open source.

Read the full story at LinuxInsider.

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

451 CAOS Links 2011.11.18

The 451 Group — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:33:04 +0000

Rapid7 secures new funding. Microsoft drops Dryad. And more.

# Rapid7 secured $50m in series C funding.

# Microsoft confirmed that it is ditching its Dryad project in favour of Apache Hadoop.

# Arun Murthy provided more details of Apache Hadop 0.23.

# The Google Plugin for Eclipse and GWT Designer projects are now fully open source.

# openSUSE released version 12.1.

# Amazon released the source code of the Kindle Fire.

# Black Duck Software joined the GENIVI Alliance.

# dotCloud announced the availability of the top three databases MySQL, MongoDB and Redis on its PaaS.

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

Cloud Migration Whitepapers

Frank Mash — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 18:26:00 +0000

Amazon's AWS team has published a series of whitepapers covering various scenarios for migrating into AWS cloud infrastructure. Links to these whitepapers are provided below for your convenience:

- Migrating applications to the AWS cloud
- Migrating web application
- Migrating batch processing applications
- Migrating backend processing pipelines

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

A world of ebooks

Giuseppe Maxia — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 12:15:00 +0000

I am a bibliophile, or, to say it in plain English, a book lover. I have been collecting books since I was in first grade. I read books at high speed, which is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because I can squeeze useful information out of a book very quickly, and that's useful for my job, and for some of my hobbies. A curse, because when I travel one book is usually not enough to keep me busy for the whole travel, and I need to carry or buy more, with negative effects on the weight of my luggage and my on my back. Ten years ago I had a brief but intense experience with electronic books in a Palm hand held device. It didn't last long, though. The quality of ebooks and readers in that period was less than optimal, and I have left the matter rest for a while.
In the meantime, I kept collecting electronic books, mostly PDF editions of technical books that I keep in my laptop for quick reference. Reading them from cover to cover, though, is not a pleasant experience in a laptop. Ditto for reading fiction or essays. The laptop screen is not comfortable for such exercise.
Then, last year, I bough an ebook reader.

That changed the whole business. Reading ebooks became very similar to reading paper books. The size of the screen and the ability of increasing font size makes your reading a pleasure. As for my back and luggage problems, that's solved hands down. The weight of the device is the same, no matter if I carry one ebook or one hundred.
Suddenly, the dozen of ebooks that I had kept idle in my laptop sprang to life, and I was able to read them like a paper book, easily, comfortably, and with pleasure.
I started buying more ebooks, both of fiction and of technical matters. The latter are especially welcome. Whenever I travel to conferences, I am tempted to buy some useful book, and then I regret when it burdens my backpack during the trip home, and fights for room on my overcrowded book shelves. No more of this. Now, when I visit a book booth at a conference, I simply take note of the interesting titles, and then I buy the ebooks at the publisher's site directly. If there is no ebook, I can easily convince me that the book is not really needed.
A few months ago there was some new development. My ebook reader's screen was faulty. It was showing a few unwanted lines at the bottom and the top of the screen, making it difficult to read menus. No big deal. I sent it to the manufacturer, which replaced the screen for free. The only trouble was that the replacement took three months! During that period, I experienced reading ebooks (to which I was by then addicted) with my Android phone, using a wonderful application named Aldiko. The user friendliness of this app more than compensated for the smaller screen size, and I was able to read technical and fiction books with little problem. But I was missing the big screen. So the delay of the back shipment was partially responsible for the lowering of my defenses, when I entered an Apple store and I couldn't leave without a new iPad.
I felt guilty for a while, but the guilt disappeared in a matter of hours, when I loaded all my ebooks in the iPad, and saw what a difference a bigger and colorful screen does. Compared to the six inches of my ebook reader, the iPad is huge, and the reading is even easier and more pleasurable. I was hooked.
Since then, my personal library of ebooks has grown rapidly. I have bought 90 (yes, ninety) books from O'Reilly, including many that I had already bought on paper, and now I am giving away to friends and libraries.
I need to spend a few words of praise for O'Reilly. In the jungle of book publishing, O'Reilly is the best and more user friendly publisher available. The quality of its books is excellent, the choice of catalog vast and modern, the service impeccable. There are other publishers that offer comparable quality (e.g. the Pragmatic bookshelf or Manning) but not the same rich catalog, or a similarly vast catalog (e.g. Packt Publishing) but not the same quality.
If I have to note any negative points about O'Reilly, is that there is no wish list in their shop. So, for now, I am restricting my wishes to my list on Amazon.

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

Report from Oracle Openworld

Sarah Novotny — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 17:51:16 +0000

Openworld 2010, despite the supposedly lagging economy, had record attendance again this year. No doubt this was the result of Oracle acquiring something like fourteen companies since last year, including Sun in 2009. The crowds were thick, divided about evenly between geeks in badly-fitting vendor t-shirts and slick sales-side hustlers with dress pants and shiny shoes. I landed somewhere in the middle of the two (badly-fitting dress shirt, comfortable jeans and loafers), proudly sporting a long dangling codpiece of ribbons from my attendee badge:

My OOW2010 Codpiece

Oracle made a number of important announcements this year at OpenWorld, including a the Exalogic machine, and support for Amazon EC2, which I blogged about here.

For me, the highlight of the week was meeting a number of top Oracle technical minds at Oracle Closed World, the brainchild of Mogens Nørgaard from Denmark. Members of the Oak Table and other luminaries of our field stood up and spoke candidly about technology, drilling down to the most minute detail. Computerworld Denmark covered the event well here.

I’ll be speaking to a hung over dwindling crowd at noon today, the last day of OOW, and the day after the blowout party on Treasure Island. By telling people about running Oracle on EC2, I hope to make life easier for DBA-kind. Amazon’s IaaS cloud gives us all a cheap way to provision host resources on demand, and get things done in hours that would otherwise take weeks (or be impossible) via normal corporate hardware procurement processes.

This will be the last big conference for me for a while – I am going to focus on Blue Gecko customers, research and sharing my insights here.

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

Open source in the clouds and in the debates

The 451 Group — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:40:49 +0000

We continue to see more evidence of the themes we discuss in our latest CAOS special report, Seeding the Clouds, which examines the open source software used in cloud computing, the vendors backing open source, the cloud providers using it and the impact on the industry.

First, as usual, we are seeing consistencies between our own research — which indicates open source is a huge part of today’s cloud computing offerings from major providers like Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Terremark and VMware — and that of code analysis and management vendor Black Duck. In its analysis of code that runs the cloud, Black Duck also found a preponderance of open source pieces, in many cases the same projects we profile in our report.

Indeed, open source software is an important part of the infrastructure, data and application layers of today’s cloud computing stacks with significant use of Linux, open source hypervisors KVM and Xen, open source data technologies such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Hadoop, NoSQL and memcached and open source languages such as Java, PHP, Python and Ruby on Rails.

There will be plenty of users and customers content to use non-open source options that serve as the defacto standards, but we do see a move to higher-level, production and mission critical use, which represents continued commercial opportunity for open source and other vendors.

One of the more subtle effects of all this open source in the cloud, as covered in Seeding the Clouds, is the impact on discussions, debates and downright fights in the market. There is much scrutiny on claims of being open, technical aspects of open and what ‘open cloud’ means. A prime example is the Twisticuffs that have gone on between Simon Crosby of XenSource and Citrix, discussing OpenCloud and the response from Open Cloud Initiative co-founder Sam Johnston, who claims this is misuse of the open label.

We already saw open source playing a role in the discussions and debates about open clouds, open APIs and open data, and this latest confrontation is evidence that role continues to be significant. We still wonder though about the question of open enough as we contemplate openness in the clouds.

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

Nginx-Fu: X-Accel-Redirect From Remote Servers

Alexey Kovyrin — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 03:45:52 +0000

We use nginx and its features a lot in Scribd. Many times in the last year we needed some pretty interesting, but not supported feature – we wanted nginx X-Accel-Redirect functionality to work with remote URLs. Our of the box nginx supports this functionality for local URIs only. In this short post I want to explain how did we make nginx serve remote content via X-Accel-Redirect.

First of all, here is what you may need this feature. Let’s imagine you have a file storage on Amazon S3 where you store tons of content. And you have an application where you have some content downloading functionality that you want to be available for logged-in/paying/premium users and/or you want to keep track of downloads your users perform on your site. If your content was on your web server, you could have used simple controlled downloads functionality built-in to nginx out of the box. But the problem is that your content is remote.

Here is what we do to solve this problem.

First, we create a special location on our nginx server. This location will be used as a proxy for all our accelerated file downloads:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35

# Proxy download
location ~* ^/internal_redirect/(.*?)/(.*) {
# Do not allow people to mess with this location directly
# Only internal redirects are allowed
internal;

# Location-specific logging
access_log logs/internal_redirect.access.log main;
error_log logs/internal_redirect.error.log warn;

# Extract download url from the request
set $download_uri $2;
set $download_host $1;

# Compose download url
set $download_url http://$download_host/$download_uri;

# Set download request headers
proxy_set_header Host $download_host;
proxy_set_header Authorization '';

# The next two lines could be used if your storage
# backend does not support Content-Disposition
# headers used to specify file name browsers use
# when save content to the disk
proxy_hide_header Content-Disposition;
add_header Content-Disposition 'attachment; filename="$args"';

# Do not touch local disks when proxying
# content to clients
proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;

# Download the file and send it to client
proxy_pass $download_url;
}

After adding this location to our nginx config we could start sending responses with headers like the following:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

# This header will ask nginx to download a file
# from http://some.site.com/secret/url.ext and send it to user
X-Accel-Redirect: /internal_redirect/some.site.com/secret/url.ext

# This header will ask nginx to download a file
# from http://blah.com/secret/url and send it to user as cool.pdf
X-Accel-Redirect: /internal_redirect/blah.com/secret/url?cool.pdf

Here is an example code you could use in a Rails application to use our internal redirect location:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

def x_accel_url(url, file_name = nil)
uri = "/internal_redirect/#{url.gsub('http://', '')}"
uri << "?#{file_name}" if file_name
return uri
end

def download
headers['X-Accel-Redirect'] = x_accel_url(some_secret_url, pretty_name)
render :nothing => true
end

As you can see, nginx is really powerful tool and when you turn your creativity on you can make it even more powerful. Stay tuned for more Nginx-Fu posts.

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN