Sunday, October 3, 2010

SpiceCorps LA Meetup

Talking about "The Cloud" sponsored by RackSpace. Join us for Pizza as we discuss Cloud services as well as other IT related topics.
 
Date: Oct 06, 2010
 
Time 7:00 PM - 9:00PM Pacific Time (US & Canada)

Mahalo.com Inc
902 Colorado Ave
Santa Monica, CA 90401
Get Directions
 

 RSVP & more info here: http://community.spiceworks.com/meeting/show/37

Friday, September 24, 2010

The 10 Sysop Commandments

The late legend Biggie Smalls wrote himself a manual about his old profession which inspired this entry.

If you are a Sysadmin here is a step-by-step booklet for you to get your game on track...




  #1: I know it's not fun: Document for you and others.

  #2SUDO

  #3: "Never trust nobody", make sure your team create secure Passwords and Keys.

  #4: "I'm sure you heard this before": RTFM!

  #5: Keep your Servers Alive: With a UPS

  #6: Don't get it mixed: It's pronounced S-Q-L not "Sequel"

  #7: "This rule is so underrated": Keep Development and Production completely separated.

  #8: Make sure you Software/Packages are up to date.

  #9: "Should have been #1 to me": Never, ever forget to Lock your Screen!

  #10: "a strong word called consignment": Call your vendors & get the best pricing.

"Follow these rules you'll have mad bread to break up" If not, then good luck...


BTW We are hiring...

Monday, September 20, 2010

NoSQL and Django Panel

At DjangoCon 2010 our very own Jacob Burch and Noah Silas sat on a panel to discuss the future of no-sql/non-related databases in Django.



Saturday, September 18, 2010

We are Hiring!

We are looking for a mid-seinor level systems administrator with a strong MySQL background along with experience working on highly scalable and high availability web sites. You should be a UNIX expert, preferably FreeBSD, but if you're know the internals of UNIX/POSIX based operating systems you should still apply for this position.

You should be very familiar with the inner workings of MySQL, how is scales and how it doesn't. You should also be able to architect and maintain large installations of databases, how to construct a workable replication scheme that will be able to grow with an ever changing web 2.0 application.

We have two cages in the United States, so you should be comfortable working in a data center and dealing with NOC technicians.

The following should excite you:
  • Unix/BSD
  • Linux
  • Puppet
  • Nagios
  • Cacti
  • MySQL
  • Memcached
  • Apache 2
  • Nginx
  • Squid
Bonus knowledge:
  • Lucene
  • Hadoop
  • HBase
  • CouchDB
  • Scripting or Programming Experience
  • Cisco Networking
Think you got what it takes? Sign up here: http://mhlo.co/biF3JW

* "Ninjas" and/or "Rock-stars" need not apply.

Monday, August 23, 2010

LA Hacker News Meet-up - Wrap Up

This past Saturday was the 3rd LA Hacker News meet-up.  The three who presented where:
  1. Sandy Strong - Elastic Search
  2. Anthony Castillo - Balsamiq Mockups
  3. Andrew Cholakia - ZeroMQ
All in all it was a great event. I recorded Sandy's presentation, I had to stop once since Aaron called me.  The audio is poor but that's what you get when you use Qik on a Motorola Droid.  My battery completely died and forgot my charger so that is why I stopped after Sandy.

Props to Bordo Stylo for hosting.  Below are a few pictures and the crappy videos from Sandy's Elastic Search Presentation.

Update: Great Photos of the event by Lars Lehtonen: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bikeboom/sets/72157624777886500/

Update 2: Andrew's Slides from his ZeroMQ presentation: https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dfjf62dt_3cqrsx3rx

Update 3: Sandy's Slides: https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ddkvqsxg_0dzzbqfcj


LA Hacker News Meetup - 08-21-2010




Thursday, August 19, 2010

Matt Ingenthron talks about Membase


Once a month Mahalo.com hosts the Los Angeles High Scalability Group Meetup.

This month Matt Ingenthron of NorthScale presented Membase, an opensource simple, fast, elastic key-value database.

We recorded the meetup to share with the world which you can view here:



To read more about the event please click here or just continue below:
Like most web applications, memcached and MySQL formed the data foundation beneath Farmville - until mid-2010. As the popularity of that application skyrocketed, a more effective system was needed to sustain FarmVille's 500,000 operations per second. In response, NorthScale, Zynga and NHN developed _membase_ - a distributed, key-value database that is 100% compatible with memcached.
Session type: 40-minute presentation

Here in the second decade of the 21st century, the kinds of apps we build have evolved. Techniques for storing and getting that data are starting to evolve too. The category even has a name: NoSQL. Which one should you choose though?
Your site really runs on memcached, occasionally accessing a SQL database. You need SQL for some types of data access, or you fear the effort involved in breaking free from some of that legacy mapping code.
Other types of data access could be serviced by something like memcached, but you would need the same speed, it would need to be compatible with current production applications and your application data has to survive the seemingly hostile environment from your cloud computing provider. You want to know that it will never make your application wait for data; you need to know that it’s been deployed for something other than batch-based workloads.
Membase is a simple, fast, elastic key-value database. Building upon the memcached engine interface, it is memcapable, meaning it is completely compatible with existing memcached clients and applications. The new engine plugin and associated tools allow for persistence, replication of data, lots of statistics on data use and even streaming data for iterating over every item in the store.
The founding sponsors of membase, NorthScale, Zynga and NHN recently launched a new project at membase.org under an Apache 2.0 license. Learn how to get it, about the deployments behind some of the largest sites and how you can get involved in the project.

About the presenter:

Matt is an experienced web architect with a software development background. He has expertise in building, scaling and operating global-scale Java, Ruby on Rails and AMP web applications by leveraging a variety of Open Source projects, including membase and memcached. Matt is currently the chief liaison to the membase Open Source project for NorthScale, and leading Developer Advocacy at NorthScale for membase and memcached.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Sandy Strong Presenting on ElasticSearch @ LA Hacker News Meetup (8.21.10)


Update:
View the Meet-up notes here: http://sysopsmahalo.blogspot.com/2010/08/la-hacker-news-meet-up-wrap-up.html

Our very own Sandy Strong reports:

"If you're free, stop by to ridicule me-- er, I mean, help represent Mahalo. And maybe watch other presentations as well. Last month there were presentations on cloud computing and node.js. The LA Hacker News meetup is this weekend at Border Stylo in West Hollywood. I'm presenting on ElasticSearch."

Info:

Saturday, August 21st at 3PM

Location: 

Border Stylo
729 Seward Street, LA, CA
90038 (cross street is Melrose Ave).

http://goo.gl/maps/ZihK

Parking: 

  • Pull up to the black parking gate on the south side of the building (closer to Melrose)
  • Press the call button and someone will open the gate
  • If the lot is full, there should be plenty of nearby street parking.
  • Else if parking on the street and walking up, please do not use the glass doors. There is a walking gate next to the parking gate. 
  • Press the call button and someone will let you in.
More Info: http://groups.google.com/group/los-angeles-hners-hacker-news

Noah Silas & John Watson on Cassandra at Mahalo.com

How we use Cassandra at Mahalo.com









See more slides and videos from the Cassandra Summit 2010: Here