Designing and printing (dot) notebooks
Since joining Server Density in October last year, I’ve been responsible for running the marketing efforts. A key belief of our CEO, David Mytton and I is that conferences are [...]
Multi data center redundancy – sysadmin considerations
Last week, I considered the implications for multi data center redundancy on your applications. This post will look at considerations for the sysadmin – network and server level failover, plus [...]
Multi data center redundancy – application considerations
A few months ago we finished a long running multi data center redundancy project to allow our server monitoring service, Server Density, to survive the complete failure of our primary [...]
Making a point with SLAs
SLAs are generally financially irrelevant because they typically cap any compensation at the total spend under the claim period e.g. if you spend $100 a month you can claim up [...]
Devops London Demographics
On 15th March I presented about scaling teams at DevOpsDays London (writeup / slides) and we sponsored the conference, including some sponsored tweets. There’s always a lot of activity around [...]
How an expired credit card can shut down your entire business
Back in the old days when you had physical servers hosting your website, a hosting provider would have to take physical steps to suspend a customer’s account – blocking network [...]
Deploying nginx with Puppet
This post is based on our talk at Puppet Camp Ghent. See our separate page for all our talk videos and slides about how Puppet is used to manage the [...]
How we handle on call schedules
Earlier this month there were a couple of good blog posts (here and here) with some suggestions and considerations for handling on-call schedules. This is something every company has to [...]
When the network fails
Problems with storage systems, particularly cloud network storage like Amazon EBS or a shared NAS, are notorious for causing complex outages which take a long time to resolve. I liken [...]
Incident troubleshooting hints with logging
You’ve been woken up with an alert and after getting to your laptop the first step is to find out what is going on. Ideally, you have quite specific alerting [...]