A while ago I had a discussion with someone about the future of server infrastructure. Among other things, we were wondering whether companies will continue to run on dedicated servers or if eventually everyone just ends up in a Cloud environment. During the discussion I raised a point that in principle Cloud is a great idea that will keep attracting more and more people, but it is missing one important piece that stops many from using it - a high performance storage. Apparently, this has just changed.
Read MoreRecently I had to turn a few EC2 instances into MySQL database servers. The third time I had to do it, I grabbed the list of steps from my previous sessions and just replayed it. Later I thought maybe polishing information a little bit and publishing a step-by-step walkthrough on the blog may help a few people. So here it is.
Read MoreI had to benchmark an EC2 instance to see whether a database could be safely moved to it. It is a good practice, which helps avoiding surprises when an instance or its storage are allocated in a noisy neighborhood, where the neighbors use so much resources that it affects the performance of our MySQL database. It is understandable that one can never get very reliable results on EC2, this is a shared environment after all, and that some fluctuations should be expected, however it is still good to know the numbers. I started my benchmarks and everything seemed fine at first, but then sometimes statistics I was getting started looking quite odd.
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