Data Architecture - From Zen to Reality

This practical guide offers a short course on scaling CouchDB to meet the capacity needs of your distributed application. Through a series of scenario-based examples, this book lets you explore several methods for creating a system that can accommodate growth and meet expected demand. In the process, you learn about several tools that can help you with replication, load balancing, clustering, and load testing and monitoring.

• Apply performance tips for tuning your database
• Replicate data, using Futon and CouchDB’s RESTful interface
• Distribute CouchDB’s workload through load balancing
• Learn options for creating a cluster of CouchDB nodes, including BigCouch, Lounge, and Pillow
• Conduct distributed load testing with Tsung

Get started with Puppet, and learn how this popular configuration management framework helps you automate your servers. This concise introduction shows you how to use Puppet’s tools and templates to organize and execute configuration plans on Linux, Unix, and Windows servers. Through code samples and real-world examples, you’ll learn how to manage pools of servers and virtual instances, and how to administer access control. If you’re new to Puppet, but familiar with systems administration and Ruby language basics, this book is the ideal way to start using this open source framework.

• Learn Puppet fundamentals, including its manifest syntax and built-in functions
• Store configurations in a central location with PuppetMaster, and define which configurations apply to which nodes
• Build a framework to create user accounts in place of LDAP or Kerberos KDC
• Apply techniques to execute and manage server configurations with MCollective
• Use Puppet as an auditing tool to ensure that configurations are correct
• Gather information on the nodes you manage with the Facter library

CouchDB is a new breed of database for the Internet, geared to meet the needs of today’s dynamic web applications. With this concise introduction, you’ll learn how CouchDB’s simple model for storing, processing, and accessing data makes it ideal for the type of data and rapid response users now demand from your applications—and how easy CouchDB is to set up, deploy, maintain, and scale.

The code-packed examples in this book will help you learn how to work with documents, populate a simple database, replicate data from one database to another, and a host of other tasks.

• Install CouchDB on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, or (if you must) from the source code
• Interact with data through CouchDB’s RESTful API, and use standard HTTP operations, such as PUT, GET, POST, and DELETE
• Use Futon—CouchDB’s web-based interface— to manage databases and documents, and to configure replications
• Learn how to create, update, and delete documents in JSON format, and how to create and delete databases
• Work with design documents to get the formatting and indexing your application requires

Three of CouchDB's creators show you how to use this document-oriented database as a standalone application framework or with high-volume, distributed applications. With its simple model for storing, processing, and accessing data, CouchDB is ideal for web applications that handle huge amounts of loosely structured data. That alone would stretch the limits of a relational database, yet CouchDB offers an open source solution that's reliable, scales easily, and responds quickly.

CouchDB works with self-contained data that has loose or ad-hoc connections. It's a model that fits many real-world items, such as contacts, invoices, and receipts, but you'll discover that this database can easily handle data of any kind. With this book, you'll learn how to work with CouchDB through its RESTful web interface, and become familiar with key features such as simple document CRUD (create, read, update, delete), advanced MapReduce, deployment tuning, and more.

• Understand the basics of document-oriented storage and manipulation
• Interact with CouchDB entirely though HTTP using its RESTful interface
• Model data as self-contained JSON documents
• Handle evolving data schemas naturally
• Query and aggregate data in CouchDB using MapReduce views
• Replicate data between nodes
• Tune CouchDB for increased performance and reliability

OpenStack was created with the audacious goal of being the ubiquitous software choice for building public and private cloud infrastructures. In just over a year, it's become the most talked-about project in open source. This concise book introduces OpenStack's general design and primary software components in detail, and shows you how to start using it to build cloud infrastructures.

If you're a developer, technologist, or system administrator familiar with cloud offerings such as Rackspace Cloud or Amazon Web Services, Deploying OpenStack shows you how to obtain and deploy OpenStack software in a few controlled scenarios.

• Learn about OpenStack Compute (known as “Nova”), OpenStack Object Store ("Swift"), and OpenStack Image Service ("Glance")
• Understand common pitfalls in architecting, deploying, and implementing your cloud infrastructure with OpenStack
• Determine which version of the OpenStack code base best suits your deployment needs
• Define your deployment scenario and finalize key design choices
• Install Nova on a single node with either the StackOps distro or an Ubuntu package
• Be familiar with important configuration options and important administrative commands