#DBHangOps 06/25/15 -- Even More Automation!
Hello everybody!
Join in #DBHangOps this Thursday, June, 25, 2015 at 11:00am pacific (19:00 GMT), to participate in the discussion about:
- What's the last script you wrote? Why?
- What's the last tool you wrote? Why?
- What's your most valuable or most used tool/script that you've developed?
- What's the first script/tool you get or build at a new job?
You can check out the event page at https://plus.google.com/events/c47c6h7c1jgl3ifptev1pnmrf5s on Thursday to participate.
As always, you can still watch the #DBHangOps twitter search, the @DBHangOps twitter feed, or this blog post to get a link for the google hangout on Thursday!
See all of you on Thursday!
You can catch a livestream at:
What's the last script you wrote? Why?
- Shlomi wrote a script that checks that event scheduler is running correctly on DBs
- Geoff wrote a script to supply tab-completion to tools for connecting to various MySQL instances in his environment
- Pim wrote a script to do a quick analysis of databases in his environment
- Silvia wrote an updated cookbook to manage a new cluster in her environment
- There's an in-house cookbook for setting up various OS-level settings for MySQL nodes
- Schemas are packaged into RPMs and deployed to machines. There's a tool to load the schema into a MySQL
- Chef cookbooks simply install this package and can load them
Schema management and automation
- Acquia runs a lot of Drupal, so schemas are handled by the Drupal package already
- Box has a schema migrator tool that's tied to their application and will help a DBA deploy the schema changes.
pt-online-schema-change is still hand-run by DBAs to apply some schema changes.
Script lifecycle
- How does script promotion work? Is it done after you've written it or does it get rewritten?
- At Box, the DBAs have their own code framework that's well-tested and provides components for programmatically accessing the MySQL infrastructure.
- Various shell scripts are written and may wrap some of these tools. These stay and might be converted into a more well-tested program in the code framework as issues are discovered or features are requested.
- At SendGrid there's a hand-off of some tools from the DBA to the engineers based on how much testing and iteration is required. For the most part, a lot of things are automated in chef and scripts
- For Shlomi, he's more development focused right now than operationally focused.
- Once a script reaches a big enough size, it needs to be promoted to "engineering-grade" code.
- If the script gets beyond "if-else-then" work it's usually time to move to more managed language to test and validate it
- A challenge with turning over scripts to development teams is that a DBA may no longer have ownership of the code
- This can make it more challenging to patch bugs or add new features to the program
What's the first script/tool you get or build at a new job?
- get stats from everything in yoru environment
- setup your dotfiles and base configs
- generate CLI graphs using gnuplot