Heads up, I’m going to be giving my Cassandra for Sysadmins’s talk at Cassandra NYC on Tuesday, December 6th.
Come by and say hello!
I’ll be talking Tuesday, 12/6/11, at the Cassandra NYC Conference.
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Rolling Upgrades for Cassandra
From 0.7 on up you can do rolling upgrades of your cluster.
A few weeks back I went from 0.7 to 0.8. Upgrade went as smooth as silk. It is sofa king awesome.
Will upgrade to 1.0 after holidays so as to bask in the glory of snappy compression, read performance gains and the leveled compaction.
Most of my process was semi-automated via Chef, but the steps below expand to what I did.
Before you start, please make sure to check for changes in the cassandra.yaml. From 0.7 to 0.8, seed strategy became pluggable as well as two or three other changes. In 1.0, I haven’t looked yet but I presume there will be other changes related to the pluggable compaction and compressions.
Code Example: Using Python Suds to Access the Bronto API.
For some internal notification system I was attempting to write a script that would occasionally clear a list in Bronto, our email delivery platform.
They have a lovely little SOAP API, but almost all of the examples were in PHP or Java. Since I am running this as a cronjob, and me being more of a Pythonist, I thought Python was a better place for me to implement this.
The Bronto team, while not terribly proficient in Python, were as helpful as they could be. My major stumbling blocks were getting the authentication mechanism to work correctly, then it took a while to discover how to properly pass arguments to the API.
Eventually I’ll do more stuff with it, but for now, I thought I’d publish this in case it might be useful for someone else using Python with thier API.
Code starts below. Mind you, I am not a developer, be kind 
Building RPMs for and setting up StatsD and Graphite on CentOS.
A while back Etsy opensourced a little node.js daemon called StatsD that makes it easy for you to ‘Measure All the Things.’
In my current environment setting up graphs for the folks on the business team and on the dev team is difficult and time consuming as it has to funnel through ops. We’re a bottleneck 
I’m hoping to implement StatsD to make graphing a service that most anyone can directly interact with and remove me and my team as the bottleneck.
Below are my notes for setting it up.
In reference to Hadoop Appliances; or, how I’m an Open Source snob.
Let me prefix this rant/post by stating that I come from the more scrappy, ‘build it out from OSS’ sort of shop, so I am highly biased toward the approach of:
- Thinking first about, and then building, your infrastructure/solution to fit your needs.
- Knowing the software inside and out.
- Relying on the community for the rest.
Over the converse ‘Enterprise’ approach of:
- Building your infrastructure based on someone’s white paper on how you should build an infrastructure to do X.
- Getting your sysadmins a set of meaningless certifications.
- Ultimately relying on commercial support as your last point of escalation.
Yes, yes, yes… this is very snobby and I am in danger of sounding as irreverent as Ted Dzuiba. I am also wholly conscious that OSS approach can be taken in the same extreme direction as the enterprise approach. in so much that everyone blindly follows the same design choices that Twitter or Facebook are doing (albeit better than anyone else) or are implementing everything in node.js or Ruby on Rails because that is what the hot-as-shit hipster developers are doing.
For me it comes down to having operational responsibility for your infrastructure, rather than a support contract. But still, I’m young and work at a hot startup; when I’m CTO of a bank maybe my view will change 
Sysdrink NYC is Back! Wednesday, September 7th at The Gingerman.
New York’s hottest Sysdrink is at The Gingerman on Wednesday, September 7th.
SAGE Level 9 Sysadmin Glands Solo has built a fantasy world that answers the question, “Noooow?”
This Sysdrink has it all: Lusers in onsies, sherpas, DEC PDP-9′s, Gurmfs (German Smurfs), and look over there in the corner — is that Richard Stallman? No. It is a fat kid on a slip ‘n slide. His knees look like biscuits and he’s ready to party!
Starting at 6:30 PM, or as early as the first guy there.
No talks, no slides, just drinks and sysadmins!
Sign up here, please so I can get a head count.
Since Lintz is busy organizing the LOPSA NYC meetings, I’m taking over. We’re gonna try to do this monthly.
Slides from my Recent Cassandra Talk at LOPSA-NYC
Spoke the other night with Jake Luciani at the NYC Chapter of the League or Professional System Administrators about Cassandra.
LOPSA is a fantastic organization that promotes Sysadmin issues and education. They have mentoring programs, conferences and meetups all around the world.
It’s a great place to meet new people, technologies and swap the always fun Sysadmin war stories. I am grateful to Matt Simmons for introducing me to the organization.
I spent a chunk of my vacation creating these slides, so you better like em.
Slides after the break…
Productionizing the Hive Thrift Server.
Ha! First day of my long awaited vacation and what do I do? Write a blog post about stuff I do at work of course!
A good portion of our team prefers to interface with Hive programatically using the Hive Thrift Server
The more we rely on it, the more we need to harden it.
It is not really setup or packaged for this so we need to go to town on it.
FileMaker Pro at ‘Web Scale’ :)
Caged Heat!
Nearly finished with our NYC datacenter move to a sweet cage at AtlanticMetro‘s new LGA4 facility. They even made us a hot plaque (thanks Renee!).
Special thanks to the team at Atlantic Metro: Steve, Christian, JP, James, Azret et all.
Most of all, special thanks to Ryan for literally bleeding for it
These guys are the best!