Take A Picture, It'll Last Longer! - GORUCO 2013

Cheap code branches permeate our daily workflow, but the code we write is only half the story. Introducing data model changes into production can challenge developers and ops people alike, but how do we deal with these issues in our experimental phase?

In this talk, we'll discuss using features provided by modern filesystems like ZFS & Btrfs to branch databases along with code, letting developers experiment and ops people model complex environments, all from the comfort of our laptops.

Transcript

1. Take a picture, it’ll last longer! Saturday, June 8, 13
2. JD Harrington  jd@jdharrington.net   @psi work at Saturday, June 8, 13
3. We almost all use Git. Saturday, June 8, 13
4. We ❤ branches. Saturday, June 8, 13
5. Sandbox our experiments Saturday, June 8, 13
6. Branch the database! Saturday, June 8, 13
7. How do we that? Saturday, June 8, 13
8. A few ideas... Saturday, June 8, 13
9. Saturday, June 8, 13
10. But my database weighs 100GB, so... Saturday, June 8, 13
11. It takes forever to copy. Saturday, June 8, 13
12. Oh, wait. Saturday, June 8, 13
13. My SSD ran out of space. Saturday, June 8, 13
14. Let’s try again... Saturday, June 8, 13
15. Saturday, June 8, 13
16. Still takes forever to add large files to Git. Saturday, June 8, 13
17. Still using a lot of extra disk space. Saturday, June 8, 13
18. Switching to a new branch is fast! Saturday, June 8, 13
19. But I’m gonna have to commit changes. Saturday, June 8, 13
20. Hey, wait! ZFS! Saturday, June 8, 13
21. Released by Sun in 2005 Saturday, June 8, 13
22. Filesystem, volume manager & software RAID Saturday, June 8, 13
23. Copy-on-write transaction model (like REE) Saturday, June 8, 13
24. Fast & cheap snapshotting & cloning features Saturday, June 8, 13
25. Kinda sounds like Git branches! Saturday, June 8, 13
26. Not just for Solaris anymore! Saturday, June 8, 13
27. Ports exist for OS X, Linux & BSD. Saturday, June 8, 13
28. Saturday, June 8, 13
29. Really, really fast. Saturday, June 8, 13
30. Used no disk space. Saturday, June 8, 13
31. But who wants to type that much? Saturday, June 8, 13
32. Sounds like a job for git hooks! Saturday, June 8, 13
33. post-checkout Saturday, June 8, 13
34. Saturday, June 8, 13
35. But wait, there’s more! Saturday, June 8, 13
36. vagrant-zfs github.com/psi/vagrant-zfs Saturday, June 8, 13
37. Questions? github.com/psi/goruco2013 Saturday, June 8, 13