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Last week, we needed to run a long-running migration as part of our weekly deployment. Our company deals with large volumes of time series data – the majority of which is managed through a single large table (we haven’t implemented data sharding yet). We needed to do some restructuring and reindexing of this table, which [...]

Last week I made some modifications to our database migration framework (Bering) to support zero-downtime database deployment. My introduction to zero-downtime database deployment comes from Michael Nygard’s excellent book, Release It!. Database migrations are one of the primary sources of planned outages during a system deployment. As we’re deploying to production every week, this is [...]

One key difference between building software products in Java versus .NET is the preponderance of open source libraries in the Java space. In .NET, most companies are content to go with a fully Microsoft stack and, after Microsoft’s anti-open source campaign of the mid-2000s, are wary of letting open source creeping into their code base. [...]

Ganglia Last week, we got Ganglia running in test and production. If you aren’t familiar with Ganglia or don’t have something like it monitoring your site then check it out. It is, frankly, amazing. Commonly deployed in the HPC space, Ganglia is used by many large, high-traffic sites to monitor their server farms. Ganglia, using [...]

This week’s release blog is brought to you by my colleague Cailie, who kindly agreed to be syndicated on my blog: Thanks for inviting me to your blog, Owen. I love your choice of wallpaper…. it’s groovy man. Before I begin – let me send a big congratulations to your Gramma on her 90th Birthday!!! [...]

Last week, I set up something that I have tried and failed to convince many operations managers to implement: getting all production configuration files and scripts under source control. I’m not sure if it is out of security concerns or a fear of contaminating the production environment with version control software or because revision control [...]

Three releases last week – at this rate I’ll need to rename this blog series. For the most part, the releases were a non-event. Quite quick and painless. One thing about releasing software in these small increments – frequent releases get easier, not harder. One thing that is constant about each release is change: change [...]

I wasn’t involved with last week’s release. Actually, I left work early to celebrate Swedish Christmas with my family. And the release went ahead without a hitch. Bliss. I believe that making a release is a core responsibility that should be shared by all members of the team. Anyone should be able to do it, [...]

Last week’s deployment was more complex than usual – we redeployed the entire system and migrated onto new hardware. Our goal, as usual, was to minimize or prevent downtime. There were a number of ways to go about the roll out, so at the start of the day we sat down and built a plan [...]

On Friday afternoon, we completed our migration from one tower server to three rack-mounted servers. This was a big move for us for a few reasons: We scaled out from a single server to a small cluster of fully load balanced web servers. This was something that we had been working on for a while [...]