River Avenue Blues

River Ave. Blues » Not Baseball

A Brief History of the Tech Behind RAB

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Jay has been RAB’s SysAdmin, you can find him on Twitter at @jaydestro.

Keeping RiverAveBlues online has been “a thing” for me over the years.  Whether it’s when I worked at a web hosting provider and was just a fan of Mike’s writing… all the way until today, where I am getting ready to start archiving the site I’ve done my best to keep available.  Back in 2009, I did a ton of technical work for free for the guys to make sure the website stayed online and ran smoothly.  To repay me, they made me a partner in the company — pretty cool, huh?

RAB has run on the WordPress blogging platform since its inception.  Originally on a shared hosting provider, the site was eventually moved to a single VM with Rackspace.  I eventually migrated everything to two dedicated servers: one was a HP DL360 G3 front end server we used for all the web traffic with Apache and the other a SuperMicro generic white box we used for the MySQL database server and memcached.

The hard part was always keeping up with the excitement of the Yankees as the accessibility of the internet exploded on mobile.  Every day we saw the need for more capacity increase as the need for Yankees news at any moment continued to explode.  Mike’s profile began to grow as he took on jobs with MLBTradeRumors and eventually CBS.  People really came to rely on the work Mike did and I took personal responsibility to keep that work online, and for it to reach as wide of an audience as possible.

One moment I always recall as pivotal in making a major overhaul to the RAB infrastructure was the day the Yankees traded for Ichiro.  I was in Oxford, England at a job I had just started.  I had recently moved the website in a “lift-and-shift” manner to AWS and really had not had a chance to do a ton of optimization.  I woke up to a slew of text messages from Mike and Joe telling me they couldn’t get to the site.  I found a free moment to fix the problem I found on total MySQL connections and got the site back online.

I later would learn a ton more about AWS from my friends Lenny Herold, Jeff Kaplan and Tony Tonns (RIP).  I would take this knowledge to eventually fully automate the RAB services to no longer rely on static VMs and moved to an autoscaling platform.  Tony taught me a ton about memcached, tuning MySQL and ensuring reliability through resilient services.  I later configured a number of cache layers and made the W3 Total Cache plug-in an absolute MUST.  I found a lot of success in using the plugin in combination with a memcached service for each cache layer.  This was for object, page and MySQL database cache that ran on RDS.  Auto-scaling the front end also became an easy task so that when our traffic increased, we could easily add capacity automatically.

As time moved on, we removed the native WordPress commenting system for Disqus.  This was an absolute godsend, as server load during “thundering herd” moments of large traffic greatly decreased. Users were storing comments in a separate database which really meant we were prepared for GDPR protections years before it was implemented.  I never really wanted RAB to be in the business of storing anyone’s data.  Because of that, the old users were eventually purged from the RAB database, including any user information you may have provided us. This makes me happy that we have never compromised/hacked thanks to good security defaults and reducing our total data exposure by simply not storing that data.

Later on, we found new ways to further reduce server load with the implementation of a CDN and better communication amongst the writers about how we needed to store static images.  That meant faster load times and better access to the site when big moments happened.

Things haven’t always been perfect, but the bigger incidents have done a ton to teach me more about what I do for a living,  I have always appreciated including communities in the work I have done or the hobbies I enjoy.  Baseball and technologies are my passions and RAB was the ultimate culmination of both for me.

Now, I work at Microsoft and teach people how to use the Azure cloud.  I also spend my time helping organize the DevOpsDays NYC conference and do the On-Call Nightmares Podcast.  I love chatting technology and baseball – feel free to reach out if you ever need help or just want to talk about these topics, or metal music, or anything pug-related  Thanks for reading RAB all these years; it’s been a big part of my life.  None of this stuff happens without Mike, Joe and Ben.. to them I am eternally grateful.  Thank you always to my wife, Betsy, who was woken up as many times as I was to fix things (and occasionally woke me up for breaking news, like the Andrew Miller trade in 2016). Eternal gratitude to everyone who came to the site and returned an HTTP call successfully. That means I did my job.

RAB Tech Stack 2007 – 2019:

Linux, WordPress, Apache, PHP, Memcached, MySQL

Yankees Only.

No Podcast Today

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Well this is a record, two posts in one day from me.  Unfortunately we won’t have a podcast for you tonight.  But there’s a good reason, fellow RAB contributor and a really good friend, Joe Pawlikowski and his lovely wife have welcomed a new baby daughter.  I pushed for the name “1998 New York Yankees Pawlikowski” but i was overruled as I am just the servers guy, not the baby guy.   Welcome to the RAB family little Veronica, and congrats to Joe, his wife and family.

We’ll be back on the regular podcast schedule Thursday to talk more Yanks!

Manchester City, Yanks to team up on NY MLS franchise

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For much of the spring, a groundswell of institutional support for a New York City-based Major League Soccer franchise has been growing. The primary owners were set to be Manchester City Football Club, and the team, owned by a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family, has had their eye on a piece of Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens. Now, the Yankees are involved as well, as a part-owners and powerful players on the New York City political scene, as they are joining with Manchester City to own part of MLS’ 20th franchise.

The Yankees will own approximately a quarter of the new soccer club, and as long as a stadium can be identified in time, the team will likely begin play during the 2015 MLS season. “We proudly welcome two of the most prestigious professional global sports organizations to Major League Soccer,” MLS Commissioner Don Garber said in a statement. “This is a transformational development that will elevate the league to new heights in this country. The New York area is home to more than 19 million people­, and we look forward to an intense crosstown rivalry between New York City Football Club and the New York Red Bulls that will captivate this great city.”

For the Yankees and Manchester City, theirs is a marriage of political expediency as much as it is about economics. Soccer franchise ownership is hardly a high-reward investment, but the Yankees, through Legends Hospitality, already work with Manchester City. More importantly, though, the Yankees have deep-seated connections to the upper echelons of New York politics. Randy Levine and Lonn Trost will likely put their heads to see a stadium deal through during the final months of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s term.

In fact, Yankees’ owner Hal Steinbrenner appointed Levine as his soccer guru in a statement this morning. “We are pleased to be associated with this major move by MLS to increase its presence in the New York market and to enhance the opportunity for New York soccer fans to enjoy high-level play in their own city. We look forward to the opportunity to work with Manchester City to create something very special for the soccer fans of New York — and to bringing another terrific team to this city for all sports fans to enjoy,” said Hal Steinbrenner, managing general partner of the New York Yankees. “Randy Levine, president of the New York Yankees, will be the point person in leading the effort to launch and establish the team on behalf of the organization.”

The real elephant in the room here though is the park land grab. New York City park advocates have been dismayed that MLS’ attention has turned to Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Already the subject of a planned expansion by the U.S. Open, this park area serves as a gathering point for many Queens communities, and plopping down a soccer stadium in the park would further limit scarce green space. The city has offered up land that’s a several miles and neighborhoods away, but the site pales in comparison with the current green expanse.

While MLS and Manchester City hope the Yanks’ involvement can push this project through to the finish line, parks advocates believe the team’s eventual lobbying efforts may serve as a wake-up call. “We hope this new deal once and for all puts to rest any further attempts to seize even more public parkland in Flushing Meadows Park,” Geoffrey Croft, president of NYC Park Advocates, said to The Times. “The Yankees were given enough.”

No matter the outcome of the stadium debate, the Yanks are poised to delve deeper into the New York City sports landscape, and it seems likely that Yankee Stadium will host a soccer team for at least its first season of existence. I wonder what the Boss would say if he were still alive.

Super Bowl XLVII Open Thread

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49ers QB Colin Kaepernick pitching in high school. (Photo via Max Preps)
49ers QB Colin Kaepernick pitching in high school. (Photo via Max Preps)

The Ravens and 49ers will meet in Super Bowl XLVII (that’s 47) tonight at 6:30pm ET on CBS, and my official prediction is a 24-20 win for San Francisco. No particular reason, it’s a complete guess on my part. My football knowledge is pretty limited; it would be generous to call me a casual fan. I enjoy watching football because I have little rooting interest and it’s nice to just sit back and enjoy a sport once in a while.

Anyway, talk about the big game (and the commercials!) or anything else right here. There are no hockey or basketball games being played and no other network is stupid enough to broadcast new shows tonight. It’s Super Bowl or bust. Enjoy.

Biz Hits: The Yanks stink; Madonna and soccer in the Bronx

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A few non-baseball related items for your overnight enjoyment: The Yankees have announced that Madonna will perform in the stadium in the Bronx on Thursday, September 6. This is the rumored “big announcement” the club teased when they sent out the release on Roger Waters’ a few weeks ago. I had guessed, and hoped for, Bruce Springsteen, but music fans will just have to settle for Madonna instead. The pre-sale starts Monday at 10 a.m. right here. The top tickets — on-field seats right in front of the center field stage — will go for $359.50 each.

Madonna, though, isn’t the only person taking her talents to Yankee Stadium this summer. According to a report on Big Apple Soccer, the House that George Built could host a July or August soccer friendly between Real Madrid and Inter Milan. Based on the Euro Cup slate and the Yanks’ schedule, Big Apple Soccer believes the most likely dates for a game are July 25 or August 11 or 12, but the various parties are still hammering out the details. The last Yankee Stadium soccer match pitted the New York Cosmos against the Miami Toros way back on August 10, 1976.

Finally, the Yanks are proving what their haters already claim: that they stink. Few details exist about this news, but according to reports, the Yanks will be releasing two fragrances at a cocktail party on February 21. One will be called simply “New York Yankees” and the other “New York Yankees For Her.” If you’ve ever wanted to smell like Francisco Cervelli, now you can. Or something like that.