#DBHangOps 09/17/15 -- Growing Your Team and more!
Hello everybody!
Join in #DBHangOps this Thursday, September, 17, 2015 at 11:00am pacific (18:00 GMT), to participate in the discussion about:
- Growing your team
- what’s your hiring criteria?
- suggested skills for members of your team
- onboarding for success
- advice for people who want to be DBAs
- New technologies. What have you used?
- Containers
- Configuration Management
- Data stores
You can check out the event page at https://plus.google.com/events/cc3lo9jgubj9jv1431bqk6987cg 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:
Growing your team
What's your hiring criteria?
- For seasoned DBAs
- Really want someone who understands production systems and has operational sensibilities
- Systems and operations focus
- Support engineering teams in developing new automation
- Developing your own automation and setting up configuration management
- Someone who has (or can develop) distributed systems expertise and managing systes of scale
- Hold perspective on a high-level architecture
- Having the "standard stuff"
- Make sure backups are good and working
- managing and reviewing schemas
Onboarding for success
- Want your new DBAs to get experienced with the application stack quickly
- it's important to hold a good relationship with the engineers that write client applications for the database infrastructure
- Want your whole stack to be more reliable and remove inefficiencies
- Identifying areas for automation with a fresh perspective
- New hire checklist!
- Put together a living document that all new hires should follow to get acquainted with your environment
- Potentially find a junior member of the organization that you can grow into the role
What advice would you give to a new DBA
- Read!
- there's been a lot of exciting blogs written up in the past few months about scaling mysql and caveats to be aware of
- Read the MySQL documentation, but also be up to date
- Avoid confining yourself to a single topic/discipline
- If you don't know about something, dig into it and go deeper
- Learn the common toolkits and their uses (e.g. percona toolkit, MySQL utilities, common_schema)
- If it's broken fix it. Don't accept things where they are.
- Find out where the backups are. Test them if they're not tested.
- Write documentation about the whole environment from your perspective and grow it
- Reach out to other people outside your team.
- Don't be shy to talk to the sys admins, network operations team, sales team, etc!
- Make friends outside your team!
New Hot Tech?
- Containers
- Service Discovery - E.g. Consul
- Other datastores
Links of supreme interest