Speaking at Percona Live Dublin: keynote, orchestrator tutorial, MySQL testing automation

I’m looking forward to a busy Percona Live Dublin conference, delivering three talks. Chronologically, these are:

  • Practical orchestrator tutorial
    Attend this 3 hour tutorial for a thorough overview on orchestrator: what, why, how to configure, best advice, deployments, failovers, security, high availability, common operations, …
    We will of course discuss the new orchestrator/raft setup and share our experience running it in production.
    The tutorial will allow for general questions from the audience and open discussions.
  • Why Open Sourcing Our Database Tooling was the Smart Decision
    What it says. A 10 minute journey advocating for open sourcing infrastructure.
  • MySQL Infrastructure Testing Automation at GitHub
    Co-presenting with Tom Krouper, we share how & why we run infrastructure tests in and near production that gives us trust in many of our ongoing, ever changing operations. Essentially this is “why you should feel OK trusting us with your data”.

See you there!

Practical Orchestrator, BoF, GitHub and other talks at Percona Live 2017

Next week I will be presenting Practical Orchestrator at Percona Live, Santa Clara.

As opposed to previous orchestrator talks I gave, and which were either high level or algorithmic talks, Practical Orchestrator will be, well… practical.

The objective for this talk is that attendees leave the classroom with a good grasp of orchestrator‘s powers, and know how to set up orchestrator in their environment.

We will walk through discovery, refactoring, recovery, HA. I will walk through the most important configuration settings, share advice on what makes a good deployment, and tell you how we and others run orchestrator. We’ll present a few scripting/automation examples. We will literally set up orchestrator on my computer.

It’s a 50 minute talk and it will be fast paced!

ProxySQL & Orchestrator BoF

ProxySQL is all the rage, and throughout the past 18 months René Cannaò and myself discussed a few times the potential for integration between ProxySQL and Orchestrator. We’ve also received several requests from the community.

We will run a BoF, a very informal session where we openly discuss our thoughts on possible integration, what makes sense and what doesn’t, and above all else would love to hear the attendees’ thoughts. We might come out of this session with some plan to pick low hanging fruit, who knows?

The current link to the BoF sessions is this. It seems terribly broken, and hopefully I’ll replace it later on.

GitHub talks

GitHub engineers will further present these talks: Continue reading » “Practical Orchestrator, BoF, GitHub and other talks at Percona Live 2017”

Percona Live Amsterdam: Community Dinner, last updates

Registration for the Percona Live Amsterdam conference community dinner at Booking.com is ongoing. Please note the following:

  • By Monday noon the kitchen will make the necessary purchasing. At this time we will have to give them a number, which we will not exceed.
  • The number we will give them is $(number of registrants Monday 12:00) + X, X being a constant
  • Those X tickets will be available until Tuesday 12:00
  • After which the registration is closed. We wish to avoid throwing away food, on one hand, as well as respect those who have reserved place and avoid running out of food, on the other.

Entry to the Booking.com building will be made available via Security personnel to those people who will be listed by the eventbrite registration. We will not be able to have last moment registrants; we will not collect money at the entrance; no credit cards accepted at the doorway.

If you’d like to attend the community dinner, please register now!

FYI Percona has arranged for boats to make the travel from the conference venue to Booking.com (no registration required, but room limited on those boats as well).

Now ain’t I being dramatic here. So happy to see everyone here in Amsterdam in a few days!

Speaking at Percona Live Amsterdam: Orchestrator

In a week’s time I’ll be speaking at Percona Live Amsterdam. I will be presenting:

Managing and Visualizing your replication topologies with Orchestrator
23 September 4:20PM

This talk will present orchestrator, on which I’ve been working for the last year and a half, originally at Outbrain and now at Booking.com.

I will show off what orchestrator can do to manage your replication topologies. From visualization, through topology refactoring to automated crash recoveries, orchestrator today plays a key role at Booking.com infrastructure, at scale (oh I love using these words).

You can expect an outrageous demo, a visual walkthrough, some command line examples, and a lot on the logic and mechanisms behind orchestrator. I will present the difficult problems orchestrator covers.

orchestrator is free and open source, and is built to be as generic as possible; it is known to be used by multiple well known companies these days, so please join the party.

With that, I conclude with the almighty motto: Continue reading » “Speaking at Percona Live Amsterdam: Orchestrator”

Percona Live Amsterdam: Community Dinner, Sep. 22nd

Keeping up with tradition, there will be a community event held at the upcoming Percona Live Europe: Amsterdam 2015 conference.

This year, Booking.com will be hosting the event at the company’s headquarters in the heart of Amsterdam.

We will hold a community dinner (dish selection, includes vegetarian; beverages will be served) in our caffeteria and hope to add some spicy activities to the event!

Space is limited, and tickets can be purchased via Eventbrite.

Special thanks to Daniël van Eeden and Jean-François Gagné for their work in making this happen! Continue reading » “Percona Live Amsterdam: Community Dinner, Sep. 22nd”

Percona Live 2015: Reflections

Some personal reflections on PerconaLive 2015:

Percona acquires Tokutek

Well done! Tokutek develops the TokuDB storage engine for MySQL and TokuMX engine for MongoDB. I will discuss the MySQL aspect only.

TokuDB was released as open source in 2013. It has attained a lot of traction and I have used it myself for some time. I met issues with locking or otherwise operational difficulties which I reported, and otherwise was fascinated by such features as great compression, online schema changes, and more.

Recently another company, InfiniDB, that also released its MySQL-backed codebase as open source, went out of business. I was afraid the same might happen to Tokutek.

I see Percona’s purchase as a very good move for the community. I saw a lot of TokuDB interest in Percona for some time now, and it is clearly interested in the technology. I expect they will add their own hands-on experience into the development of more operations-friendly features; put effort in solving locking issues (it’s been a while since I last checked, of course some of these may have been addressed by now). I am guessing they will work on a Galera/TokuDB integration and offer a “Toku-XtraDB-Cluster”.

TokuDB can compete with InnoDB in many places, while in others each will have its distinct advantage.

I see this is as good news for the community.

Community Awards and Lightning Talks

On a completely different subject, I believe it is commonly accepted that this year’s setup for the community awards & lightning talks was unsuccessful. The noise was astounding, human traffic was interrupting and overall this was a poor experience. We (Giuseppe Maxia, Kortney Runyan & myself) made a quick, informal brainstorming on this and came up with a couple ideas. One of which we hope to try in the upcoming Percona Live Europe – Amsterdam.

We apologize to the speakers for the difficulties.

Percona Live Europe – Amsterdam

Haha! Having recently relocated to the Netherlands I’m of course very happy. But regardless, Percona Live London was fun – and yet running on low fuel. I think it was a great idea to change location (and more locations expected in the future). This is the path taken by such conferences as OSCon, Velocity, Strata and more. Amsterdam in particular, as I’ve recently learned, is especially appreciated by many. I think this conf will do great!

Woz

And now for something completely different. Woz’ talk was that. I’m happy he came; I appreciate that he discussed education; and it was fun.

Speaking at Percona Live: Pseudo GTID and Easy Replication Topology Management

In two weeks time I will be presenting Pseudo GTID and Easy Replication Topology Management at Percona Live. From the time I submitted the proposal a LOT has been developed, experimented, deployed and used with both Pseudo GTID and with orchestrator. In my talk I will:

  • Suggest that you skip the “to GTID or not to GTID” question and go for the lightweight Pseudo GTID
  • Show how Pseudo GTID is used in production to recover from various replication failures and server crashes
  • Do an outrageous demonstration
  • Tell you about 50,000 successful experiments and tests done in production
  • Show off orchestrator and its support for Pseudo GTID, including automated crash analysis and recovery mechanism.

I will further show how the orchestrator tooling makes for a less restrictive, more performant, less locking, non-intrusive, trusted and lightweight replication topology management solution. Continue reading » “Speaking at Percona Live: Pseudo GTID and Easy Replication Topology Management”

Percona Live 2015: Call for Papers is open

And not for long!

The Call for Papers for Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, to be held at Santa Clara in April 2015, is open. The dead line for submissions is Nov. 16th; that’s just around the corner.

As with previous years, we will hold a 4 day conference, the first being a tutorials day and three days for sessions, BoF and lightning talks, as well as community events. The committee is expecting to review at about 250-300 submissions, out of which it will pick at about 100 talks to schedule or reserve.

We will be using these tracks:

  • High Availability
  • DevOps
  • Programming
  • Performance Optimization
  • Replication and Backup
  • MySQL in the Cloud
  • MySQL and NoSQL
  • MySQL Case Studies
  • Security
  • What’s New in MySQL

This year we will roughly pre-define the desired number of sessions we wish to have per track. This is not set in stone and everything is fluid. Yet, this will give us better guidelines at choosing and pursuing content for this conference.

Submitting a proposal

We encourage all members of the community to submit their tutorial/session/BoF proposals as soon as possible. Please register/login at the conference home page.

The guidelines for submitting a proposal are generally unchanged; please review past recommendations: [1], [2], [3], [4]. To add to all these:

  • Do note that we are likely to only review a proposal just once. Please submit only after you have finalized your draft.
  • Make a reasonable length of proposal. We believe 250 – 300 words are quite enough for a good proposal. Please don’t write an essay, and remember that you proposal is what gets printed on the schedule, and what is read by the conference attendees when choosing the next talk to go to.
  • Write a descent Bio.

Continue reading » “Percona Live 2015: Call for Papers is open”

Some anecdotes I learned at Percona Live

While on the plane back home I wrote down all my impressions from Percona Live 2014. Have lots of TODOs and great ideas to implement. Among all my impressions, there were a few anecdotes worth noting.

  • 5.6 GTID is still unfriendly. It will require complete shutdown & reconfiguration of your entire replication topology; and some companies present hacks around this. Notable, Facebook recoded GTID related code (slave agrees to replicate with GTID even though its master still uses binlog coordinates). Booking.com have their own hack around slowly migrating their topologies. And in a great lightning talk we were shown how to patch MySQL such that the relay logs turn into a  consistent GTID-like coordinate system.
  • Galera replication has been implemented for TokuDB (only active-passive mode, not active-active). This came as a surprise to Tokutek ; apparently Codership did this within a few hours of work. The rest is up for Tokutek!
  • WebScaleSQL is a cool initiative that aims to assist in pushing commonly desired featured back upstream. It is Web Scale. It is also not a productio0n distribution and I do not expect it to be, It is not a fork that is meant for the common DBA to download and deploy.
  • Tungsten replicator has MySQL to Hadoop replication using staging tables – an auditing of changes that are group-deployed on Hadoop.
  • Still so many people unfamiliar with MySQLSandbox. It’s such a basic tool, especially for testing and local installations.
  • Still misconceptions about common_schema. Yes, I do use it on production.
  • Everyone has the same problems 🙂
  • Replication is still queen of MySQL’s featureset. We’re still all about failing over, promoting, scaling via replication.
  • Linux rules. Where two MacBooks failed to connect to the projector, my Lenovo/Ubuntu Linux did the job just fine and saved the day.

Speaking at Percona Live: common_schema, MySQL DevOps

In less than a month I’ll be giving these two talks at Percona Live:

If you are still unfamiliar with common_schema, this will make for a good introduction. I’ll give you multiple reasons why you would want to use it, and how it would come to immediate use at your company. I do mean immediate, as in previous common_schema presentations I happened to get feedback emails from attendees within the same or next day letting me know how common_schema solved an insistent problem of theirs or how it exposed an unknown status.

I’ll review some useful views & routines, and discuss the ease and power of QueryScript. common_schema is a Swiss-knife of solutions, and all from within your MySQL server.

I am using common_schema in production on a regular basis, and it happened to be hero of the day in multiple occasions. I’ll present a couple such cases.

common_schema 2.2: DBA's framework for MySQL (April 2014) from Shlomi Noach

This is a technical talk touching at some cultural issues.

At Outbrain, where I work, we have two blessings: a large group of engineers and a large dataset. We at the infrastructure team, together with the ops team, are responsible for the availability of the data. What we really like is technology which lets the owners of a problem be able to recognize it and take care of it. We want ops guys to do ops, and engineers to do engineering. And we want them to be able to talk to each other and understand each other.

What tools can you use to increase visibility? To allow sharing of data between the teams? I’ll share some tools and techniques that allow us to automate deployments, detect a malfunctioning/abusing service, deploy schema changes across dozens of hosts, control data retention, monitor connections, and more.

We like open source. The tools discussed are mostly open source, or open sourced by Outbrain.

I’ll explain why these tools matter, and how they serve the purpose of removing friction between teams, allowing for quick analysis of problems and overall visibility on all things that happen.

MySQL DevOps at Outbrain from Shlomi Noach

Do come by!