Garage DC (The old blog)

I used to have a blog a while ago called garagedc [at] blogspot. I closed the blog after a while because the content didnt turn out the way i wanted. I think blogging is quite difficult and when your new to blogging it takes some experience and practice, expecially if you want to write something that can help others. I felt that because it didnt turn out as i had planned its better that i try to understand more about writing, read alittle more and understand how to convey the message across in a better way. I guess this is my second attempt so i hope its better.

When I closed my first blog i wasnt aware that i actually had a few readers that were actively following and when i shut the blog down i recieved a few emails, messages from youtube and also from facebook asking where my blog had disappeared to. This is a quick message just to say, sorry about that guys, next time i'll let you guys know :)

As a final way to close the old blog down (even though its been down for a while) i'll just give a rundown of what it was about.

During the course of building our product, my team built a large testing platform which consisted of 8 really old servers and 2 racks costing a total of just under 1000 AUD or there abouts. The reason we built this hardware was to allow us to do development, testing and also a test bed for learning different technologies which we felt we may need to use should we need to scale. Some of the things we were able to achieve with the hardware were the following:

• balancing load over multiple application server machines and test the results
  
• failover and ensuring that a failed server still allowed the application to function normally.
  
• the applications behaviour spanned over multiple machines (making sure sessions were not bound to single nodes etc)
  
• learn how to build and configure a proper mySQL clusters over multiple machines (as we may need to do that in future)
  
• learn how to use and configure LVS
  
• experiment and play with how to expand the application in different directions
  
• using CPU affinity and test whether we could push a few of the non important backend batch jobs to one CPU and minimize impact on the main application. We purchased our servers from serverbeach (peer1) here, so we wanted to make sure that with the one server we had could run everything even though the batch jobs may have run slower. Even though the servers were old they where multi core cpu's so it helped with the testing
  
• learn how to build a beowulf cluster and see how it load balances processes, not related to the project but just for fun

We could have bought a single powerful server and used VM's as some people had suggested but the reason why we went for this option is it was just cheaper.and easier for us to configure. Our servers were about $20-$50 AUD each and most of the cost was on the racks , petrol and getting some extra power into the garage to accomodate the rare times we would power it all up for a complete end to end test.

Also for us it was easy to configure the servers into whatever setting our tests needed. My day job is to work with infrastructure so i could do what i needed faster then with VM's.

It has been about 1 and a bit years since we started but when you have responsibilities and more then yourself to support its not easy to just quit your job so the best way for me and also my team to work around it is to trade time for money. Take abit longer but still finish and try to maintain income up to the final point. Its not easy doing both, it slows things down alittle but its reality, the only way to not be a victim of circumstance is to work harder, alittle smarter and to take some unorthodox channels to get things done.

I heard finishing the product was the easy part, then the hard stuff later. Well im new to the startup world and so is my co-founder but but we like what we do, the excitment is still there (same as it was from day 1), we are still full of energy and no matter what comes our way we'll try to face it ....

With that being said, goodbye to garagedc and welcome to the stressedfounder :) Here is a video from the setup that we put together so we could learn more about different configurations of databases, load balancing and application configuration, now we use it to do our testing -( yes, watching this take me up memory lane :D)