As part of the move away from a proprietary in memory database madb, last.fm is moving to ApacheCassandra. Cassandra is far more easier to deploy to a public cloud (in our case GCE), scale up/down and query. madb, being completely in memory does have pretty good performance characteristics, but scaling requires machines with more ram, sharding by user and in has some weird and interesting bugs.

I have been trying to debug an initramfs hook that I wrote, which wasnt doing what I wanted it to (namely it did literally nothing at all). Some debugging was in order. I wanted get into the initramfs image environment and see what was going on and what assumptions I have made that turned out to be incorrect.