Blogging Roller

After thirteen years of hosting this blog at Kattare.com, I've moved it over to DigitalOcean. Kattare was great, but nowadays I prefer managing my own server and DigitalOcean makes that very easy -- and costs less ($10/month vs. $26/month at Kattare).

The move was easy, or as easy as setting up OpenJDK 8, Tomcat 7 and MySQL 5.5 can be. I only hit one little snag. Once I added the Roller WAR to Tomcat, Tomcat would hang on startup. I used jstack to look at the Java VM threads and found some clues that led me to a post on ServerFault.com: Tomcat 7 hangs on deploying apps. As recommended in that post, I added -Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom to my CATALINA_OPTS and was back in action.

I've already mentioned this on Twitter and LinkedIn, but just in case you missed it: I'll be speaking tomorrow night at the Triangle AWS and Triangle DevOps joint meetup at Argyle Social in Durham, NC. I'll give a quick overview of cloud orchestration and Wayin Hub. Then I'll dive into the details of how we automate deployment, scaling and backups for Wayin Hub using AWS and AWS Cloud Formation.

As a little teaser, here's a GIF animation of my automated deployment slide:

For more information check the Triangle DevOps page for the event.

UPDATE: slide are now on SlideShare.

Interesting speculation on the make-up of Amazon's cloud:

Amazon EC2 cloud is made up of almost half-a-million Linux servers | ZDNet :

We know that Linux on servers is big and getting bigger. We also knew that Linux, thanks to open-source cloud programs like Eucalyptus and OpenStack, was growing fast on clouds. What he hadn’t know that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), had close to half-a-million servers already running on a Red Hat Linux variant.

Huang Liu, a Research Manager with Accenture Technology Lab with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering whose has done extensive work on cloud-computing, analyzed EC2’s infrastructure and found that Amazon EC2 is currently made up of 454,400 servers.

Next year there will be two CommunityOne events in the US of A; one in New York City on March 18 and the other, coinciding with JavaOne week in June 1 in San Francisco. Here's the call for papers link. The call closes on December 11.