Monthly Archives: January 2007

A lesson in on the limits of administrating your way out of problems: Shared MySQL

I just finished reading a post to the Media Temple blog about their MySQL problems . I think it is an excellent example of what happens when you only have one side of the house trying to fix a problem. The post leaves out some details but they make it clear that they believe their problems were caused by badly written apps hammering the database. It sounds like they tried very hard to fix the issues on the hardware and MySQL side but couldn't so have switched the way they are provisioning the database systems to more isolate the problem sites. The moral of that story is that even when you are smart you can't always fix software problems on the systems side.

The Media Temple guys don't go into any great detail on their current shared MySQL system but I would think that if nothing else they ran into the problems listed in this post: performance of complex queries. At some point you just have too many people trying to hit your database for any one person to achieve efficiency.

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Debian EC2 AMI

After working on my FC6 AMI I started thinking about how small of an AMI I could create. The goal would be to have a 10 meg or less image that is very specialized for doing something like serving images with lighttpd or apache. I started very very small but the lack of console access on EC2 makes it hard to debug errors so I moved on to try and find a reasonable sized distro that I was more sure would work. I managed to find a Debian image that is pretty small and decided to see if I could make it work for EC2.

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Creating your own FC6 instance for EC2

I've been playing around with the EC2 service at Amazon and figured I would document a little about how you create your own FC6 AMI. The Amazon documentation goes over everything you need to know about creating your own FC4 AMI and if you don't want to roll your own you can use one of the public AMIs. Amazon just started letting people publish their own AMIs on their site so you should expect to see more as time goes by.

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