Monthly Archives: June 2008
Structure08, my impressions so far
It’s a day packed with keynotes, panels and shmoozing, with some topics overlapping with Velocity; yet at a much higher level. We’ve alternated between interesting panels (“Harnessing explosive growth”) where the key points are: a proper architecture lets you scale … Continue reading
Velocity: John Allpaw @flickr, Capacity Planning
What can cause downtime: bugs edge cases security incidents real capacity problems Deployment and management tricks from the HPC world: ganglia, System Imager Gather metrics of course, and build models, ideally out of live data, rather than artificial benchmarks. fityk … Continue reading
Velocity: Adam Bechtel @yahoo, Performance plumbing
When building a global network, you start building out knobs (usually implemented as routing policies): cost, packet loss, latency, maintenance, diversity, isolation, “special” [Really funny analogy between anycast and toilets, caching and water supply] After having developed routing policies, you … Continue reading
Velocity: Panel, a survival guide
Panelists: presented by Adam Jacob (HJK Solutions), Shayan Zadeh (Zoosk, Inc. ), Brian Moon (dealnews.com), Don MacAskill (SmugMug), John Allspaw (Flickr (Yahoo!)), Michael Halligan (BitPusher, LLC) and a gentleman (Fotolog) Don McAskill: Rafael Nadal started to win Roland-Garros and his … Continue reading
Velocity: Sean Quilan @google, Storage at scale
Strategy: buy lots of commodity hardware, because problems tend to be too big for their problem space. Hardware reliability is not that useful as well because it’s expensive. [Showing the same pictures over and over again, someone from Google PR, … Continue reading
Velocity: Rich Wolski @ucsb, EUCALYPTUS
Eucalyptus is an open-source implementation (not production-ready) of a compute cloud API-compatible with EC2. In academia sysadmin time is very expensive so the roll-out has to be really simple. Eucalyptus currently uses xen and includes a security layer that replaces … Continue reading
Velocity: Brent Chapman @great circle, what can IT professionals learn from emergency services?
Example: a car hits a fire hydrant. Lots of agencies involved (fire dpt, ambo, police, electrical company). How do they coördinate all that? Incident Command System is the protocol used in pretty much all emergency situations (courses available here). I’ll … Continue reading
Velocity: some perf. tools used at Google
Grinder, jMeter and some Windows tool, whose name I did not catch.
Velocity: Luiz Barroso @google, efficient energy ops
Hypothetical energy cost extrapolations, 5 years from now, hardware could be only 20-50% of the total energy costs. Efficiency defined as computing speed divided by power. Can be broken down further (computing speed / power provided to chip x power … Continue reading
Velocity: John Fowler (Sun), Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure
John is responsible for hardware @Sun. Web is built on a new software stack (varnish, rails, memcache, hadoop, etc.) Trends: 16 cores per socket for 2009, Sun, AMD and Intel on the same track. Clock rates will remain the same. … Continue reading
