Imagine that you have a cluster with two machines side by side in an active/standby configuration. Let’s say you have your data replicated, and the systems are basically identical except for the IP address and hostname. You can use heartbeat to share an IP address such that if the primary fails, the secondary takes over. [...]

My wife asked me today if I could give a colleague some advice for how to backup a bunch of Macs. I’ll share my advice for you here. Over the past two decades I’ve used so many different backup systems and software and hardware combinations, I can’t even count them all. So this begs the [...]

I have been writing a 10-part series on the Rackspace Cloud Blog. I’ll be keeping a running list of the posts here as they are published.
Rule 1 – Cache is Your Friend
Rule 2 – Don’t write to the database in real time
Rule 3 – Use a “Stateless” design whenever possible
Rule 4 – Avoid Unnecessary External [...]