Weekly Snap: Introducing CouchDB & Nginx, Offering Dev Job & NETWAYS Training

11 – 15 July introduced CouchDB, new ways of using Nginx, a part-time job opening and our training course schedule for September.
Christoph put a spin on the popular Nginx for use as a load-balanced image converter. As the first step, he showed how Nginx can distribute incoming queries to other web servers. He defined an upstream server and vhost to check for the requested image on all servers and to generate it in a shared directory when it is not found. In the second step, he used vhost’s image filter and security check for image optimisation. SSL and other image formats can be easily integrated, making this a handy tool but most of all scalable, stable and (with a bit of additional effort) also redundant.
Following on Gunnar introduced CouchDB. The Erlang, doc based DBMS has been packaged for most Linux distributions, and thanks to its HTTP based REST interface, can be accessed by most HTTP clients. With a simple UI for admin and database editing, it differs from relational DBMS in that no database schemas in the form of tables need to be defined upon DB setup. Instead, JSON formatted documents can be directly stored in the DB. Documents are accessed via _id, and views can be defined to enable access via other fields. In using an internal binary tree CouchDB can offer performance comparable with indexes in relational DBMS. Information on replication, document validation and more can be found on the Apache project page and in the online book “CouchDB: The Definitive Guide”.
Marius continued to fortify the development team, announcing a position for a student with Python and UML modelling experience. Uni students available to work 80 hours a month, and are interested in working on open source projects with a focus on Python, object modelling in UML based on EMF, document oriented databases, XML and JSON interfaces are welcome to apply at jobs@netways.de or find more info in our jobs area.
Ending the week, Rebecca gave a rundown of upcoming NETWAYS training courses in Icinga (19 – 23 Sep), Nagios (19 – 22 Sep), Puppet (13 – 15 Sep) and SLA Reporting with Jasper (28 – 29 Sep). Thanks to our innumerable consulting projects, we have much practical experience in dealing with highly varied environments and installations to share through our courses. These are designed for intensive learning with small groups, and many opportunities to share ideas and experience between attendees. For more, see our training area.