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One of the most common concerns people have is how to ensure that their application is safe, secure and available in the event of an emergency. Often I have found that people are mistakenly believe that they are protected when in fact they often have ignored potential scenarios. The principles explained apply equally well in …

Traditionally ecommerce companies have had no place in the cloud. The lack of established standards, multi-tenancy nature and need to be PCI compliant have been three large barriers to entry for any organization exploring this possibility. Recently many e-commerce companies (including OpenSky) have begun to implement a hybrid approach to infrastructure mixing traditional data centers …

Where have all the good databases gone? Perhaps you’ll recognize these words, “About five years ago I started to notice an odd thing. The products that the database vendors were building had less and less to do with what the customers wanted. … So, what is this growing disconnect?” Those words were written in 2004 …

One of the most frustrating things about bash scripts is how challenging it is to create unix style executibles. You know, the ones where you can pass in -h or –help and see the set of options for the program. Up until now this has been a very manual process in bash, but no longer. …

Cloud no longer a single vendor game. For years cloud computing has been synonymous with Amazon whose Amazon Web Services really created and defined the space. In the past year other providers have matured and in some areas even surpassing Amazon.

Justin Hileman and I gave a presentation on “Augmenting RDBMS with NoSQL for e-commerce” at the PgEast 2011 conference. This presentation is really the sequel (no pun intended) to my presentation, MongoDB & Ecommerce : A Perfect Combination. This presentation takes you through how we created a hybrid solution blending both sql and nosql to achieve …

Earlier today RackSpace announced that they are releasing their Cloud technologies as Open Source under the newly formed project OpenStack. RackSpace is the second largest cloud provider, behind cloud computing pioneer, Amazon. They have partnered with some of the largest names in the industry to create Open Stack including NASA, Dell, Citrix, AMD, Intel, Right …

Image by Kyle May via Flickr Every so often a “new” technology catches on. RIght now it’s nosql databases. A couple years ago it was Ruby, before that it was java. Each arise because they propose a solution to an existing problem, or in other words a better way of doing something.. something, but not …

Image by langalex via Flickr Amazon, Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter all started on sql databases (all but Amazon on MySQL) and have transitioned to incorporated nosql databases into their infrastructure, though many utilize both relational databases as well as non-relational ones. I’ve compiled a few resources to help bring you up to speed on nosql …

Image via Wikipedia Every self respecting linux, mac os X or *nix user should have a solid handle on managing jobs in unix. The following will explain how to run tasks in the background, bring tasks to the foreground, background already running tasks and keeping a task running while logged out.