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PBMS in Drizzle | Ramblings.

For those not familiar with PBMS it does two things: provide a place (not in the table) for BLOBs to be stored (locally on disk or even out to S3) and provide a HTTP interface to get and store BLOBs.

This means you can do really neat things such as have your BLOBs replicated, consistent and all those nice databasey things as well as easily access them in a scalable way (everybody knows how to cache HTTP).

This is awesome. How many times have you added a URL to your database table and then had to write API’s of some sort to go fetch that URL at read time, and write that URL somewhat atomically at write time?

Drizzle isn’t even “done” yet, and already the plugins are flying out of the community. The fact that this is a plugin, and won’t affect *anybody* who doesn’t want it, is why I’m confident Drizzle is moving in the right directly. I’m not sure why it has taken so long, but this feels like its doing for the RDBMS what apache has done for HTTP serving… make it flexible and extensible, and folks will find interesting ways to use it.

Cloud Computing Security.

The linked presentation above came up in a discussion the other day on IRC about what to do with certificates and SSH host keys.

I hadn’t really thought about this. Sometimes it feels like once you put on your “somebody else is thinking about security” blinders, the world just starts moving faster and the ideas get more interesting. Unfortunately, at this high speed, I have to wonder if the impact may not be fatal for some heavy cloud (ab)users. › Continue reading

Here is the PDF version of the Ignite format talk I gave at DevOps Day US 2010. Hopefully they’ll have the video of the ignite talks up soon.

Did you ever hear a claim that sounded too bad to be true?
So this past Tuesday at Velocity 2010, Brett Piatt gave a workshop on the Cassandra database. I was seated in the audience and quite interested in everything he had to say about running Cassandra, given that I’ve been working on adding Cassandra and other scalable data stores to Ubuntu.

Then at one point, up popped a table that made me curious.
› Continue reading

Attention Stalkers: You’ll need to forge a badge to follow me around in these sessions, as I believe the conference is sold out. That is, unless you already registered.

Personal schedule for Clint Byrum: Velocity 2010, Web Performance & Operations Conference – O’Reilly Conferences, June 22 – 24, 2010, Santa Clara, CA.

ooops.. fixed the link to actually work if you’re not logged in to oreilly.com as ME

I’ll be moderating this. Come by and we can rap about Ubuntu Server!

Ubuntu Server BoF at Velocity 2010 « Ubuntu Server Blog.

So, in my role at Canonical, I’ve been asked to package some of the hotter “web 2.0″ and “cloud” server technologies for Ubuntu’s next release, 10.10, aka “Maverick Meerkat”.

While working on this, I’ve discovered something very frustrating from a packaging point of view thats been going on with fast moving open source projects. It would seem that rather than produce stable API’s that do not change, there is a preference to dump feature after feature into libraries and software products › Continue reading

“because we believe that all web applications should take security seriously. Today we’re open sourcing a piece of software, Grendel, that we think can help many sites (not just financial applications) protect users’ data from a RockYou-style mass disclosure in a simple way.”

Pretty interesting stuff.. and makes perfect sense for those websites out there playing russian roulette with their users’ data…

YouTube – RSA Animate – Drive.

• btrfs – BTRFS is pretty awesome, with filesystem level snapshotting and compression, it promises to make some waves on the server and small devices. Unfortunately, its still marked as EXPERIMENTAL by its own developers, and there are known bugs. However, you can choose to play with it in Ubuntu 10.04, which should be helpful for people finding and submitting bugs so the developers can feel better about people using it. There is a desire to have it as the default filesystem for the next Ubuntu LTS release, which is pretty exciting.
• Monitoring is too easy – Any time I see 10+ implementations of the same idea, I figure its probably something that is easy enough that people tend to write their own instead of searching for a solution. Monitoring and graphing seem to be in this category, with many solutions such as nagios, opennms, zenoss, munin, ganglia… the list goes on and on. We talked a lot about what to do in Ubuntu Server to make sure this is done well and makes sense, and basically ran out of time. The best part of the session though, was that we decided to focus on solving the data collection problem first, so each server takes responsibility for itself, and then allow centralized aggregation on another level.
• Server Community – There is some desire to have people test Ubuntu Server before a release, especially for the LTS releases. A beta program was proposed, but there is some doubt (my own included) that this will actually get people to test before the .0 release. Basically I have to think that as a server admin, people aren’t interested in even trying something in an unstable state. They’ll take the .0 and build a new server rev, but they’re not going to go around upgrading stable servers. This needs more thought and discussion definitely.

Sitting in the first session for Wednesday now listening to a session about the next 6 months of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud and Eucalyptus development. Very exciting stuff!