Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Even without staffing shortages, local merchants have difficulty answering calls while all hands are busy, and Goodcall wants to alleviate some of that burden from America’s 30 million small businesses.

Goodcall’s free cloud-based conversational platform leverages artificial intelligence to manage incoming phone calls and boost customer service for businesses of all sizes. Former Google executive Bob Summers left Google back in January, where he was working on Area 120 — an internal incubator program for experimental projects — to start Goodcall after recognizing the call problem, noting that in fact 60% of the calls that come into merchants go unanswered.

“It’s frustrating for you and for the person calling,” Summers told TechCrunch. “Every missed call is a lost opportunity.”

Goodcall announced its launch Wednesday with $4 million in seed funding led by strategic investors Neo, Foothill Ventures, Merus Capital, Xoogler Ventures, Verissimo Ventures and VSC Ventures, as well as angel investors including Harry Hurst, founder and co-CEO of Pipe.com, and Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff.

Goodcall mobile agent. Image Credits: Goodcall

Restaurants, shops and merchants can set up on Goodcall in a matter of minutes and even establish a local phone number to free up an owner’s mobile number from becoming the business’ main line. The service is initially deployed in English and the company has plans to operate in Spanish, French and Hindi by 2022.

Merchants can choose from six different assistant voices and monitor the call logs and what the calls were about. Goodcall can also capture consumer sentiment, Summers said.

The company offers three options, including its freemium service for solopreneurs and business owners, which includes up to 500 minutes per month of Goodcall services for a single phone line. Up to five additional locations and five staff members costs $19 per month for the Pro level, or the Premium level provides unlimited locations and staff for $49 per month.

During the company’s beta period, Goodcall was processing several thousands of calls per month. The new funding will be used to continue to offer the free service, hire engineers and continue product development.

In addition to the funding round, Goodcall is unveiling a partnership with Yelp to tap into its database of local businesses so that those owners and managers can easily deploy Goodcall. Yelp data shows that more than 500,000 businesses opened during the pandemic. The company pulls in from Yelp a merchant’s open hours, location, if they offer Wi-Fi and even their COVID policy.

“We are partnering with Yelp, which has the best data on small businesses, and other large distribution channels to get our product to market,” Summers said. “We are bringing technology into an industry that hasn’t innovated since the 1980s and democratizing conversational AI for small businesses that are the main driver of job creation, and we want to help them grow.”

Data platform Splunk today announced that it has acquired two startups, Plumbr and Rigor, to build out its new Observability Suite, which is also launching today. Plumbr is an application performance monitoring service, while Rigor focuses on digital experience monitoring, using synthetic monitoring and optimization tools to help businesses optimize their end-user experiences. Both of these acquisitions complement the technology and expertise Splunk acquired when it bought SignalFx for over $1 billion last year.

Splunk did not disclose the price of these acquisitions, but Estonia-based Plumbr had raised about $1.8 million, while Atlanta-based Rigor raised a debt round earlier this year.

When Splunk acquired SignalFx, it said it did so in order to become a leader in observability and APM. As Splunk CTO Tim Tully told me, the idea here now is to accelerate this process.

Image Credits: Splunk

“Because a lot of our users and our customers are moving to the cloud really, really quickly, the way that they monitor [their] applications changed because they’ve gone to serverless and microservices a ton,” he said. “So we entered that space with those acquisitions, we quickly folded them together with these next two acquisitions. What Plumbr and Rigor do is really fill out more of the portfolio.”

He noted that Splunk was especially interested in Plumbr’s bytecode implementation and its real-user monitoring capabilities, and Rigor’s synthetics capabilities around digital experience monitoring (DEM). “By filling in those two pieces of the portfolio, it gives us a really amazing set of solutions because DEM was the missing piece for our APM strategy,” Tully explained.

Image Credits: Splunk

With the launch of its Observability Suite, Splunk is now pulling together a lot of these capabilities into a single product — which also features a new design that makes it stand apart from the rest of Splunk’s tools. It combines logs, metrics, traces, digital experience, user monitoring, synthetics and more.

“At Yelp, our engineers are responsible for hundreds of different microservices, all aimed at helping people find and connect with great local businesses,” said Chris Gordon, Technical Lead at Yelp, where his team has been testing the new suite. “Our Production Observability team collaborates with Engineering to improve visibility into the performance of key services and infrastructure. Splunk gives us the tools to empower engineers to monitor their own services as they rapidly ship code, while also providing the observability team centralized control and visibility over usage to ensure we’re using our monitoring resources as efficiently as possible.”

Splunk, the publicly traded data processing and analytics company, today announced that it has acquired SignalFx for a total price of about $1.05 billion. Approximately 60% of this will be in cash and 40% in Splunk common stock. The companies expect the acquisition to close in the second half of 2020.

SignalFx, which emerged from stealth in 2015, provides real-time cloud monitoring solutions, predictive analytics and more. Upon close, Splunk argues, this acquisition will allow it to become a leader “in observability and APM for organizations at every stage of their cloud journey, from cloud-native apps to homegrown on-premises applications.”

Indeed, the acquisition will likely make Splunk a far stronger player in the cloud space as it expands its support for cloud-native applications and the modern infrastructures and architectures those rely on.

Ahead of the acquisition, SignalFx had raised a total of $178.5 million, according to Crunchbase, including a recent Series E round. Investors include General Catalyst, Tiger Global Management, Andreessen Horowitz and CRV. Its customers include the likes of AthenaHealth, Change.org, Kayak, NBCUniversal and Yelp.

“Data fuels the modern business, and the acquisition of SignalFx squarely puts Splunk in position as a leader in monitoring and observability at massive scale,” said Doug Merritt, president and CEO, Splunk, in today’s announcement. “SignalFx will support our continued commitment to giving customers one platform that can monitor the entire enterprise application lifecycle. We are also incredibly impressed by the SignalFx team and leadership, whose expertise and professionalism are a strong addition to the Splunk family.”

Back in 2013, Yelp was a 9-year old company built on a set of internal systems. It was coming to the realization that running its own data centers might not be the most efficient way to run a business that was continuing to scale rapidly. At the same time, the company understood that the tech world had changed dramatically from 2004 when it launched and it needed to transform the underlying technology to a more modern approach.

That’s a lot to take on in one bite, but it wasn’t something that happened willy-nilly or overnight says Jason Fennell, SVP of engineering at Yelp . The vast majority of the company’s data was being processed in a massive Python repository that was getting bigger all the time. The conversation about shifting to a microservices architecture began in 2012.

The company was also running the massive Yelp application inside its own datacenters, and as it grew it was increasingly becoming limited by long lead times required to procure and get new hardware online. It saw this was an unsustainable situation over the long-term and began a process of transforming from running a huge monolithic application on-premises to one built on microservices running in the cloud. It was a quite a journey.

The data center conundrum

Fennell described the classic scenario of a company that could benefit from a shift to the cloud. Yelp had a small operations team dedicated to setting up new machines. When engineering anticipated a new resource requirement, they had to give the operations team sufficient lead time to order new servers and get them up and running, certainly not the most efficient way to deal with a resource problem, and one that would have been easily solved by the cloud.

“We kept running into a bottleneck, I was running a chunk of the search team [at the time] and I had to project capacity out to 6-9 months. Then it would take a few months to order machines and another few months to set them up,” Fennell explained. He emphasized that the team charged with getting these machines going was working hard, but there were too few people and too many demands and something had to give.

“We were on this cusp. We could have scaled up that team dramatically and gotten [better] at building data centers and buying servers and doing that really fast, but we were hearing a lot of AWS and the advantages there,” Fennell explained.

To the cloud!

They looked at the cloud market landscape in 2013 and AWS was the clear leader technologically. That meant moving some part of their operations to EC2. Unfortunately, that exposed a new problem: how to manage this new infrastructure in the cloud. This was before the notion of cloud-native computing even existed. There was no Kubernetes. Sure, Google was operating in a cloud-native fashion in-house, but it was not really an option for most companies without a huge team of engineers.

Yelp needed to explore new ways of managing operations in a hybrid cloud environment where some of the applications and data lived in the cloud and some lived in their data center. It was not an easy problem to solve in 2013 and Yelp had to be creative to make it work.

That meant remaining with one foot in the public cloud and the other in a private data center. One tool that helped ease the transition was AWS Direct Connect, which was released the prior year and enabled Yelp to directly connect from their data center to the cloud.

Laying the groundwork

About this time, as they were figuring out how AWS works, another revolutionary technological change was occurring when Docker emerged and began mainstreaming the notion of containerization. “That’s another thing that’s been revolutionary. We could suddenly decouple the context of the running program from the machine it’s running on. Docker gives you this container, and is much lighter weight than virtualization and running full operating systems on a machine,” Fennell explained.

Another thing that was happening was the emergence of the open source data center operating system called Mesos, which offered a way to treat the data center as a single pool of resources. They could apply this notion to wherever the data and applications lived. Mesos also offered a container orchestration tool called Marathon in the days before Kubernetes emerged as a popular way of dealing with this same issue.

“We liked Mesos as a resource allocation framework. It abstracted away the fleet of machines. Mesos abstracts many machines and controls programs across them. Marathon holds guarantees about what containers are running where. We could stitch it all together into this clear opinionated interface,” he said.

Pulling it all together

While all this was happening, Yelp began exploring how to move to the cloud and use a Platform as a Service approach to the software layer. The problem was at the time they started, there wasn’t really any viable way to do this. In the buy versus build decision making that goes on in large transformations like this one, they felt they had little choice but to build that platform layer themselves.

In late 2013 they began to pull together the idea of building this platform on top of Mesos and Docker, giving it the name PaaSTA, an internal joke that stood for Platform as a Service, Totally Awesome. It became simply known as Pasta.

Photo: David Silverman/Getty Images

The project had the ambitious goal of making their infrastructure work as a single fabric, in a cloud-native fashion before most anyone outside of Google was using that term. Pasta developed slowly with the first developer piece coming online in August 2014 and the first  production service later that year in December. The company actually open sourced the technology the following year.

“Pasta gave us the interface between the applications and development teams. Operations had to make sure Pasta is up and running, while Development was responsible for implementing containers that implemented the interface,” Fennell said.

Moving to deeper into the public cloud

While Yelp was busy building these internal systems, AWS wasn’t sitting still. It was also improving its offerings with new instance types, new functionality and better APIs and tooling. Fennell reports this helped immensely as Yelp began a more complete move to the cloud.

He says there were a couple of tipping points as they moved more and more of the application to AWS — including eventually, the master database. This all happened in more recent years as they understood better how to use Pasta to control the processes wherever they lived. What’s more, he said that adoption of other AWS services was now possible due to tighter integration between the in-house data centers and AWS.

Photo: erhui1979/Getty Images

The first tipping point came around 2016 as all new services were configured for the cloud. He said they began to get much better at managing applications and infrastructure in AWS and their thinking shifted from how to migrate to AWS to how to operate and manage it.

Perhaps the biggest step in this years-long transformation came last summer when Yelp moved its master database from its own data center to AWS. “This was the last thing we needed to move over. Otherwise it’s clean up. As of 2018, we are serving zero production traffic through physical data centers,” he said. While they still have two data centers, they are getting to the point, they have the minimum hardware required to run the network backbone.

Fennell said they went from two weeks to a month to get a service up and running before this was all in place to just a couple of minutes. He says any loss of control by moving to the cloud has been easily offset by the convenience of using cloud infrastructure. “We get to focus on the things where we add value,” he said — and that’s the goal of every company.

Founded in 2004 to help people find great local businesses, Yelp has some 135 million monthly unique visitors. With those traffic volumes Yelp’s 300+ engineers are constantly working to keep things moving smoothly – and when you move that fast you learn many things.

Fortunately for the global MySQL community, three Yelp DBAs will be sharing what they’ve learned at the annual Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo this April 13-16 in Santa Clara, California.

Say “hello” to Susanne Lehmann, Jenni Snyder and Josh Snyder! I chatted with them over email about their presentations, on how MySQL is used at Yelp, and about the shortage of women in MySQL.

***

Tom: Jenni, you and Josh will be co-presenting “Next generation monitoring: moving beyond Nagios ” on April 14.

You mentioned that Yelp’s databases scale dynamically, and so does your monitoring of those databases. And to minimize human intervention, you’ve created a Puppet and Sensu monitoring ensemble… because “if it’s not monitored, it’s not in production.” Talk to me more about Yelp’s philosophy of “opt-out monitoring.” What does that entail? How does that help Yelp?

Jenni: Before we moved to Sensu, our Nagios dashboards were a sea of red, muted, acknowledged, or disabled service checks. In fact, we even had a cluster check to make sure that we never accidentally put a host into use that was muted or marked for downtime. It was possible for a well-meaning operator to acknowledge checks on a host and forget about it, and I certainly perpetrated a couple of instances of disks filling up after acknowledging a 3am “warning” page that I’d rather forget about. With Sensu, hosts and services come out of the downtime/acknowledgement state automatically after a number of days, ensuring that we’re kept honest and stay on top of issues that need to be addressed.

Also, monitoring is deployed with a node, not separate monitoring configuration. Outside of a grace period we employ when a host is first provisioned or rebooted, if a host is up, it’s being monitored and alerting. Also, alerting doesn’t always mean paging. We also use IRC and file tickets directly into our tracking system when we don’t need eyes on a problem right away.

Tom: Susanne, in your presentation, titled “insert cassandra into prod where use_case=?;” you’ll discuss the situations you’ve encountered where MySQL just wasn’t the right tool for the job.

What led up to that discovery and how did you come up with finding the right tools (and what were they) to run alongside and support MySQL?

Susanne: Our main force behind exploring other datastores alongside MySQL was that Yelp is growing outside the US market a lot. Therefore we wanted the data to be nearer to the customer and needed multi-master writes.

Also, we saw use cases where our application data was organized very key-value like and not relational, which made them a better fit for a NoSQL solution.

We decided to use Cassandra as a datastore and I plan to go more into detail why during my talk. Now we offer developers more choices on how to store our application data, but we also believe in the “right tool for the job” philosophy and might add more solutions to the mix in the future.

Tom: Jenni, you’ll also be presenting “Schema changes multiple times a day? OK!” I know that you and your fellow MySQL DBAs are always improving and also finding better ways of supporting new and existing features for Yelp users like me. Delivering on such a scale must entail some unique processes and tools. Does this involve a particular mindset among your fellow DBAs? Also, what are some of those key tools – and processes and how are they used?

Jenni: Yelp prizes the productivity of our developers and our ability to iterate and develop new features quickly. In order to do that, we need to be able to not only create new database tables, but also modify existing ones, many of which are larger than MySQL can alter without causing considerable replication delay. The first step is to foster a culture of automated testing, monitoring, code reviews, and partnership between developers and DBAs to ensure that we can quickly & safely roll out schema changes. In my talk, I’ll be describing tools that we’ve talked about before, like our Gross Query Checker, as well as the way the DBA team works with developers while still getting the rest of our work done. The second, easy part is using a tool like pt-online-schema-change to run schema changes online without causing replication delay or degrading performance

Tom: Josh, you’ll also be speaking on “Bootstrapping databases in a single command: elastic provisioning for the win.” What is “elastic provisioning” and how are you using it for Yelp’s tooling?

Josh: When I say that we use elastic provisioning, I mean that we can reliably and consistently build a database server from scratch, with minimal human involvement. The goal is to encompass every aspect of the provisioning task, including configuration, monitoring, and even load balancing, in a single thoroughly automated process. With this process in place, we’ve found ourselves able to quickly allocate and reallocate resources, both in our datacenters and in the cloud. Our tools for implementing the above goals give us greater confidence in our infrastructure, while avoiding single-points of failure and achieving the maximum possible level of performance. We had a lot of fun building this system, and we think that many of the components involved are relevant to others in the field.

Tom: Susanne and Jenni, last year at Percona Live there was a BoF session titled “MySQL and Women (or where are all the women?).” The idea was to discuss why there are “just not enough women working on the technology side of tech.” In a nutshell, the conversation focused on why there are not more women in MySQL and why so relatively few attend MySQL conferences like Percona Live.

The relative scarcity of women in technical roles was also the subject of an article published in the August 2014 issue of Forbes, citing a recent industry report.

Why, in your (respective) views, do you (or don’t) think that there are so few women in MySQL? And how can this trend be reversed?

Susanne: I think there are few women in MySQL and the reasons are manifold. Of course there is the pipeline problem. Then there is the problem, widely discussed right now, that women who are entering STEM jobs are less likely staying in there. These are reasons not specific for MySQL jobs, but rather for STEM in general. What is more specific for database/MySQL jobs is, in my opinion, that often times DBAs need to be on call, they need to stay in the office if things go sideways. Database problems tend often to be problems that can’t wait till the next morning. That makes it more demanding when you have a family for example (which is true for men as well of course, but seems still to be more of a problem for women).

As for how to reverse the trend, I liked this Guardian article because it covers a lot of important points. There is no easy solution.

I like that more industry leaders and technology companies are discussing what they can do to improve diversity these days. In general, it really helps to have a great professional (female) support system. At Yelp, we have AWE, the Awesome Women in Engineering group, in which Jenni and I are both active. We participate in welcoming women to Yelp engineering, speaking at external events and workshops to help other women present their work, mentoring, and a book club.

Jenni: I’m sorry that I missed Percona Live and this BoF last year; I was out on maternity leave. I believe that tech/startup culture is a huge reason that fewer women are entering and staying these days, but a quick web search will lead you to any number of articles debating the subject. I run into quite a few women working with MySQL; it’s large, open community and generally collaborative and supportive nature is very welcoming. As the article you linked to suggests, MySQL has a broad audience. It’s easy to get started with and pull into any project, and as a result, most software professionals have worked with it at some time or another.

On another note, I’m happy to see that Percona Live has a Code of Conduct. I hope that Percona and/or MySQL will consider adopting a Community Code of Conduct like Python, Puppet, and Ubuntu. Doing so raises the bar for all participants, without hampering collaboration and creativity!

* * *

Thanks very much, Susanne, Jenni and Josh! I look forward to seeing you next month at the conference. And readers, if you’d like to attend Percona Live, use the promo code Yelp15 for 15% off! Just enter that during registration. If you’re already attending, be sure to tweet about your favorite sessions using the hashtag #PerconaLive. And if you need to find a great place to eat while attending Percona Live, click here for excellent Yelp recommendations.

The post Yelp IT! A talk with 3 Yelp MySQL DBAs on Percona Live & more appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

It’s hard to believe that the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo is just over two months away (April 13-16 in Santa Clara, California). So if you’ve been thinking about submitting a proposal for the popular “Lightning Talks” and/or “Birds of a Feather” sessions, it’s time to get moving because the deadline to do so if February 13.

Lightning Talks provide an opportunity for attendees to propose, explain, exhort, or rant on any MySQL-related topic for five minutes. Topics might include a new idea, successful project, cautionary story, quick tip, or demonstration. All submissions will be reviewed, and the top 10 will be selected to present during the one-hour Lightning Talks session on Wednesday (April 15) during the Community Networking Reception. Lighthearted, fun or otherwise entertaining submissions are highly welcome. Submit your proposal here.

“MySQL 101″ is coming to Percona Live 2015.

Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions enable attendees with interests in the same project or topic to enjoy some quality face time. BoFs can be organized for individual projects or broader topics (e.g., best practices, open data, standards). Any attendee or conference speaker can propose and moderate an engaging BoF. Percona will post the selected topics and moderators online and provide a meeting space and time. The BoF sessions will be held Tuesday night, (April 14) from 6- 7 p.m. Submit your BoF proposal here.

This year we’re also adding a new program for MySQL “newbies.” It’s called “MySQL 101,” and the motto of this special two-day program is: “You send us developers and admins, and we will send you back MySQL DBAs.” The two days of practical training will include everything they need to know to handle day-to-day MySQL DBA tasks.

“MySQL 101,” which is not included in regular Percona Live registration, will cost $400. However, the first 101 tickets are just $101 if you use the promo code “101” during checkout.

New: 25-Minute Sessions
On the first day of the conference, Percona is now offering 25-minute talks that pack tons of great information into a shorter format to allow for a wider range of topics. The 25-minute sessions include:

I also wanted to give another shout-out to Percona Live 2015’s awesome sponsor, which include: VMware, Yahoo, Deep Information Sciences, Pythian, Codership, Machine Zone, Box, Yelp, MariaDB, SpringbokSQL, Tesora, BlackMesh, SolidFire, Severalnines, Tokutek, VividCortex, FoundationDB, ScaleArc, Walmart eCommerce and more.(Sponsorship opportunities are still available.)

The great thing about Percona Live conferences is that there is something for everyone within the MySQL ecosystem – veterans and newcomers alike. And for the first time this year, that community expands to encompass OpenStack. Percona Live attendees can also attend OpenStack Live events. Those events run April 13-14, also at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara and Santa Clara Convention Center.

OpenStack Live 2015’s awesome sponsors include: PMC Sierra and Nimble Storage!

With so much to offer this year, this is why there are several more options in terms of tickets. Click the image below for a detailed view of what access each ticket type provides.

Register here for the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo.

Register here for the OpenStack Live Conference and Expo.

For full conference schedule details please visit the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo website and the OpenStack Live Conference Website!

I hope to see you in Santa Clara in a couple months!

The post Percona Live 2015 Lightning Talks, BoF submission deadline Feb. 13! And introducing “MySQL 101″ program appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

Today we announced the full conference sessions schedule for April’s Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2015 and this year’s event, once again at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara and Santa Clara Convention Center, looks to be the biggest yet with networking and learning opportunities for MySQL professionals and enthusiasts at all levels.

Conference sessions will run April 14-16 following each morning’s keynote addresses (the keynotes have yet to be announced). The 2015 conference features a variety of formal tracks and sessions related to high availability, DevOps, programming, performance optimization, replication and backup. They’ll also cover MySQL in the cloud, MySQL and NoSQL, MySQL case studies, security (a very hot topic), and “what’s new” in MySQL.

The sessions will be delivered by top MySQL practitioners at some of the world’s leading MySQL vendors and users, including Oracle, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yelp, Percona and MariaDB.

Sessions will include:

• “Better DevOps with MySQL and Docker,” Sunny Gleason, Founder, SunnyCloud
• “Big Transactions on Galera Cluster,” Seppo Jaakola, CEO, Codership
• “Database Defense in Depth,” Geoffrey Anderson, Database Operations Engineer, Box, Inc.
• “The Database is Down, Now What?” Jeremy Tinley, Senior MySQL Operations Engineer, Etsy.com
• “Encrypting MySQL data at Google,” Jeremy Cole, Sr. Systems Engineer, and Jonas Oreland, Software Developer, Google
• “High-Availability using MySQL Fabric,” Mats Kindahl, Senior Principal Software Developer, MySQL Group, Oracle
• “High Performance MySQL choices in Amazon Web Services: Beyond RDS,” Andrew Shieh, Director of Operations, SmugMug
• “How to Analyze and Tune MySQL Queries for Better Performance,” Øystein Grøvlen, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Oracle
• “InnoDB: A journey to the core III,” Davi Arnaut, Sr. Software Engineer, LinkedIn, and Jeremy Cole, Sr. Systems Engineer, Google, Inc.
• “Meet MariaDB 10.1,” Sergei Golubchik, Chief Architect, MariaDB
• “MySQL 5.7 Performance: Scalability & Benchmarks,” Dimitri Kravtchuk, MySQL Performance Architect, Oracle
• “MySQL at Twitter – 2015,” Calvin Sun, Sr. Engineering Manager, and Inaam Rana, Staff Software Engineer, Twitter
• “MySQL Automation at Facebook Scale,” Shlomo Priymak, MySQL Database Engineer, Facebook
• “MySQL Cluster Performance Tuning – The 7.4.x Talk,” Johan Andersson CTO and Alex Yu, Vice President of Products, Severalnines AB
• “MySQL for Facebook Messenger,” Domas Mituzas, Database Engineer, Facebook
• “MySQL Indexing, How Does It Really Work?” Tim Callaghan, Vice President of Engineering, Tokutek
• “MySQL in the Hosted Cloud,” Colin Charles, Chief Evangelist, MariaDB
• “MySQL Security Essentials,” Ronald Bradford, Founder & CEO, EffectiveMySQL
• “Scaling MySQL in Amazon Web Services,” Mark Filipi, MySQL Team Lead, Pythian
• “Online schema changes for maximizing uptime,” David Turner, DBA, Dropbox, and Ben Black, DBA, Tango
• “Upgrading to MySQL 5.6 @ scale,” Tom Krouper, Staff Database Administrator , Twitter

Of course Percona Live 2015 will also include several hours of hands-on, intensive tutorials – led by some of the top minds in MySQL. We had a post talking about the tutorials in more detail last month. Since then we added two more: “MySQL devops: initiation on how to automate MySQL deployment” and “Deploying MySQL HA with Ansible and Vagrant.” And of course Dimitri Vanoverbeke, Liz van Dijk and Kenny Gryp will once again this year host the ever-popular “Operational DBA in a Nutshell! Hands On Tutorial!”

Yahoo, VMWare, Box and Yelp are among the industry leaders sponsoring the event, and additional sponsorship opportunities are still available.

Worldwide interest in Percona Live continues to soar, and this year, for the first time, the conference will run in parallel with OpenStack Live 2015, a new Percona conference scheduled for April 13 and 14. That event will be a unique opportunity for OpenStack users and enthusiasts to learn from leading OpenStack experts in the field about top cloud strategies, improving overall cloud performance, and operational best practices for managing and optimizing OpenStack and its MySQL database core.

Best of all, your full Percona Live ticket gives you access to the OpenStack Live conference! So why not save some $$? Early Bird registration discounts are available through Feb. 1, 2015 at 11:30 p.m. PST.

I hope to see you in April!

The post Percona Live 2015 conference sessions announced! appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

You know you’ll be there so why not save some $$ by registering now for the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2015 (April 13-16 in Santa Clara, Calif.). Super Saver registration discounts are available through Dec. 14 at 11:30 p.m. PST. (That’s just 10 days away!)

What to expect this year? The Percona Live 2015 conference committee is putting together another fantastic event for the global MySQL community’s next meeting in April. The full conference agenda will be announced in January, but the initial roster includes:

• Sunny Bains, Senior Engineering Manager at Oracle; “InnoDB 5.7- What’s New”
• Yoshinori Matsunobu, Database Engineer at Facebook; “Fast Master Failover Without Data Loss”
• Jeremy Cole, Senior Systems Engineer at Google, Inc.; “Exploring Your Data With InnoDB Explorer”
• Tom Krouper, Staff Database Administrator at Twitter; “Upgrading to MySQL 5.6 @ Scale”
• Jenni Snyder, Database Administrator at Yelp; “Schema changes multiple times a day? OK!”
• Ike Walker, Database Architect at Flite; “Assembling the Perfect MySQL Toolbox”
• Jean-François Gagné, Senior System Engineer/Architect at Booking.com; “Binlog Servers at Booking.com”
• Jeremy Glick, Lead DBA at MyDBAteam, and Andrew Moore, MySQL DBA at Percona; “Using MySQL Audit Plugins and Elasticsearch ELK”
• Tomáš Komenda, Team Lead and Database Specialist, and Lukáš Putna, Senior Developer and Database Specialist at Seznam.cz; “MySQL and HBase Ecosystem for Real-time Big Data Overviews”
• Alexander Rubin, Principal Consultant at Percona; “Advanced MySQL Query Tuning”

And while the call for papers deadline has expired, there are still sponsorship opportunities available for the world’s largest annual MySQL event. Sponsors become a part of a dynamic and growing ecosystem and interact with more than 1,000 DBAs, sysadmins, developers, CTOs, CEOs, business managers, technology evangelists, solutions vendors, and entrepreneurs who attend the event.

Current sponsors include:

• Diamond Plus: VMware
• Gold: Codership, Pythian
• Silver: Box, SpringbokSQL, Yelp
• Exhibit Only: FoundationDB, Severalnines, Tokutek, VividCortex
• Other Sponsors: MailChimp
• Media Sponsor: Database Trends & Applications , Datanami, InfoQ , Linux Journal, O’Reilly Media

Percona Live 2015 will feature a variety of formal tracks and sessions related to High Availability, DevOps, Programming, Performance Optimization, Replication and Backup, MySQL in the Cloud, MySQL and NoSQL, MySQL Case Studies, Security, and What’s New in MySQL.

As usual the conference will be held in the heart of Silicon Valley at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara and Santa Clara Convention Center. But this year Percona has also unveiled OpenStack Live 2015, a new conference that will run in parallel with Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2015 on April 13 and 14.

And don’t forget, Super Saver registration discounts are available through Dec. 14 at 11:30 p.m. PST. I hope to see you in Santa Clara!

The post Sneak peek at the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2015 appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.