Are you more likely to take the toll road when you have EZ-Pass or Fast Lane?  Are you more likely to splurge on that steak dinner when you’ve got the plastic credit card to pay with instead of hard-earned cash?  Cloud computing is the credit card of the 21st Century — on demand resources, on [...]

Some of our clients have asked us recently for an overview of our MySQL health check service.  I wanted to take some time and summarize the MySQL health check service and some of the steps we take. Bitlancer health checks are a monthly review of one or more MySQL servers in a customer’s environment.  We [...]

Special consideration must be given when making schema changes to large tables in MySQL that use the InnoDB or MyISAM storage engines.  Specifically, both engines by default will lock the table entirely while schema changes are being performed.  We’re often asked by clients how changes to large tables can be made without blocking end user [...]

In our post last year, Rackspace Cloud & FreeBSD, we discussed all the benefits of Rackspace Cloud less FreeBSD support.  As avid Rackspace Cloud users both internally and across our client base, we access the control panel and API quite often, and noticed that as of today a FreeBSD 9.0 base image is now available. [...]

You’ve heard it time and time again: “X as a service”, where X is either a random letter or a usually meaningful computer science term.  Confusing?  Sometimes. “As a service” solutions are services that abstract away a part (or all) of an operation from an end user.  While “painting as a service” and “lawn mowing [...]