I ran across a slide show about Varnish on slideshare.net. So, I thought I'd share it with you. I've written about Varnish before and will likely write about it again as I continue my testing. But, all in all, something about it very much appeals to me. So, I keep gathering information about it. Here's a little piece of that information.
Presentations on Scalability
Peteris Krumins has put together an excellent list of presentations on Scalability on his blog. Having already seen many of these I can say that it is indeed a very good list. If you have an interest in scaling web sites it's worth the time to check out these resources he has collected.
Source: http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/2007/08/scalability-and-scalable-architecture.html
Deployment with Capistrano via Webistrano
Where I work we frequently use Capistrano1 to deploy our PHP projects. The advent of Capistrano 2 and now a very interesting new web GUI for Capistrano 2 with multi-stage2 looks to have just saved me a good bit of work. Or, in this case, work I was probably never going to get done anyway.
Webistrano is a web based GUI front-end to Capistrano. Capistrano is designed as a command line tool. Capistrano is very much, at it's heart, a remote execution tool to execute commands remotely over SSH on one or many remote target machines. This makes, for example, deploying or gathering information from many hosts at once very trivial and quick. That's good for systems administrators.
On NFS, ZFS, and OpenSolaris from Joyent
Storage is often on my mind these days. I was recently going back through some data and found a presentation from last February. It's quite relevant and well worth the time to watch. It is a 19 slide presentation presented by Ben Rockwood5 of Joyent. It's called, "NFS: A Customer Perspective, Bridging the Gap Beween Research and Production."1 Nothing like a litte light reading to clear the mind!
In summary, it is a bit Joyent centric which is fine because they are doing really cool stuff but you'll learn about OpenSolaris2, NFS, and iSCSI strength's and weaknesses. You'll get some hints about the Joyent Accellerator3 platform. Finally, you'll get plenty of search bait4 to carry on searching and learning afterwards.
From a Business Perspective:
The crux of this is that if you choose and use your technology wisely and manage it even more wisely then you can indeed save time and therefore money when it comes to scaling your applications.
Resources:
1. NFS: A Customer Perspective - http://www.cuddletech.com/Connectathon2007.pdf
2. OpenSolaris - http://www.opensolaris.org/os/
3. Joyent Accellerator Platform - http://www.joyent.com/accelerator
4. Search Bait - Information gleaned from a search, document or target that provides informationf or futher searches, informaiton, or targets.
5. Ben Rockwood Blog - http://www.cuddletech.com/
Monitoring Guidelines
I was recently asked to make some general recommendations to a client for monitoring a MySQL database, memcached, and machines in general. So, off the top of my head, here is what I came up with. I'm sure with more thought it could be duly refined but, it's a decent list I think to get the ball rolling.