SysDrink in 2012!

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Nathan Milford

SysDrink is now rocking it’s own site, twitter account as well as sponsorship from Outbrain!

At the last SysDrink I was able to chat aimlessly with ops engineers at NYC’s top startups.

I got some good leads on scaling graphite
Learned how others approach their orchastration tools
Learned NOT to use RVM in production.

It is always good when you put a bunch of enthusiastic engineers (who usually end up at the more fascinating infrastructures solving the harder problems) in a room together outside of a meetup/talk.

Meetups/Talks set agendas for conversations. People come to the SysDrink to socialize, network, vent, compare notes and swap war stories about diverse subjects that don’t always fit into a talk or meetup.

This is the value of a SysDrink. If you’re not in NYC and would like to run a SysDrink in your area, ping me and I can set you up on the sysdrink.info calendar and twitter account to post events.

I’ll be talking Tuesday, 12/6/11, at the Cassandra NYC Conference.

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Nathan Milford

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!

Rolling Upgrades for Cassandra

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Nathan Milford

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.

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Code Example: Using Python Suds to Access the Bronto API.

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Nathan Milford

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

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Building RPMs for and setting up StatsD and Graphite on CentOS.

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Nathan Milford

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.

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In reference to Hadoop Appliances; or, how I’m an Open Source snob.

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Nathan Milford

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

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Sysdrink NYC is Back! Wednesday, September 7th at The Gingerman.

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Nathan Milford

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!

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

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Nathan Milford

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.