System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.
This must be one of the greatest presentations on the Amazon AWS that I’ve ever seen. It uses a gradual approach – from small and simple to huge and complex. It covers a whole lot of different Amazon AWS services, how they compliment each other, at which stage and scale they become useful, and more.
Even quickly jumping through the slides gave me a lot to think (and Google) about.
A while back I wrote this blog post on the subject of using SSH via bastion hosts. If you are into this sort of thing, have a look at this blog post by my brother. He is providing a few more explanations and clarifications, as well as covers a tricky to troubleshoot case with non-default location of your SSH configuration files and keys.
My brother is blogging about a really weird issue we had today. Apparently, the old school approach of working with disk volumes, and mounting them is not enough anymore. These days, systemd is responsible for part of that workflow and it can bite you in the behind if you are not careful.
Solution: run “systemctl daemon-reload” whenever you edit /etc/fstab.
Run boy run! This world is not made for you …
This Hacker News thread is full of tips, tricks, and references to reducing Amazon AWS costs. There is plenty of good advice from cleaning up the data and releasing unused resources, to monitoring the reserved instances usage, to moving data from elastic volumes to the Amazon S3 for cheaper storage and smaller traffic bills.
Percona Database Performance Blog runs this post – MySQL vs. MariaDB: Reality Check – comparing the MySQL, MariaDB and the Percona Server for MySQL. I think that most people using MySQL or MariaDB today consider them to be pretty much identical (a fork for legal reasons or something along those lines).  This blog post shows that there are quite a few significant differences.