Posts with keyword: velocity08

10 entries

Velocity 08: Puppet In-Depth and Hands-On

Tue Jun 24 18:10:00 2008

The final talk of the day (hope I make my flight) was by Luke Kanies of Reductive Labs on Puppet. Most automation tools are based on SSH and as a result, they suck. The problem is that the intersection of administrator and developers is very small. Luke wanted Puppet to be so good it was like bringing a gun to a knife fight. The goal: manage lots of machines with very little effort. Luke makes an analogy about the transition from assembly to C and moving from commands and files to "resources." Resources are abstract and portable. Abstraction is
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Velocity 08: Even Faster Web Sites

Tue Jun 24 14:45:00 2008

Steve Souders of Google is speaking on Even Faster Web Sites. I've read Steve's book and loved it. It's the kind of book you read in the morning, use to make changes to your site in the afternoon and at the end of the day, you've made a huge difference. Usually, a small percentage of the time (10%) a browser spends putting a page in front of the user is spent downloading the HTML document. Making the Web server faster might save compute time or storage, but it doesn't do much for the user's perceived response time. 80-90% of
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Velocity 08: Storage at Scale

Tue Jun 24 13:10:00 2008

Google's reliability strategy is to buy cheap hardware with no reliability features and create reliable clusters from them because no problem Google wants to solve fits on a single machine anyway. The Google File System (GFS) is a cluster file system with a familiar interface, but not POSIX compliant. Bigtable is a distributed database system. This has a custom interface, not SQL. There are 100's of instances of each of these cells scaling in to 1000's of servers and petabytes of data. in the GFS, a master manages metadata. Data is broken into chunks (64Mb) and multiple copies (typically
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Velocity 08: Some Tools for Improving Web Performance

Tue Jun 24 12:42:00 2008

HTTPWatch is an HTTP traffic viewer for Internet Explorer. There's a free basic edition, but the professional edition is almost $300! Whew! Firebug for Firefox, of course, remains free. Fiddler is a Web debugging proxy that runs on a local port on your PC. It registers itself as a system proxy so it should work with most browsers (Firefox needs special configuration apparently). You can also point a browser on another machine at the proxy running on your PC. Wonder if you could do this in Fusion? It would probably work fine. You can also use it to monitor
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EUCALYPTUS - Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems

Tue Jun 24 11:05:00 2008

Rich Wolski from University of California, Santa Barbara is speaking about an open source implementation of cloud computing that has an interface compatible with Amazon's EC2 called Eucalyptus. Rich does research on grid computing. He's been looking for the "open source" cloud. He mentions Numbus (Univ. of Chicago) and Enomalism. But nothing came close to what they wanted: Linux image hosting ala Amazon. By choosing to make their interface compatible with EC2, they take advantage of all the client side tools that work with EC2 to manage machines in Eucalyptus. They want one-button install of their system on top
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Velocity 08: High Performance AJAX Applications

Mon Jun 23 16:24:00 2008

Julien Lecomte from Yahoo! is speaking about creating performant AJAX applications. The most important point: plan for performance from day 1. Interestingly many of his initial points are about telling the developer to work with the product manager and not just say "no." Julien references an Web Site Optimization: 13 Simple Steps by Stoyan Stefanov. Here's some tips: Less is more. Don't do unnecessary things. Break rules. Make compromises and break best practices when needed. For example, you might decide to forgo CSS. Especially CSS expressions. Work on improving perceived performance. Cheat by making users think things are done
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Velocity 08: Actionable Logs

Mon Jun 23 15:17:00 2008

Mandi Walls from AOL is talking about creating actionable logs. Actionable logs are logs that provide data that can be used to fix problems. There are a few rules to start with: No nonsense logging Concise, easy to understand Express symptoms of productions issues Any that makes the log needs to be somethings that can be fixed (better signal to noise ratio) Everytime you write to a log file, you're expending resources. The point of logging in production is diagnosing issues. You need to be able to understand the logs at 4am in the morning. The primary goal is
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Velocity 08: Energy Efficient Operations

Mon Jun 23 12:50:00 2008

Luiz Barroso from Google is speaking about Energy Efficient Operations. Computing has a great track record of having a positive impact on society. The world needs more computing. But more computing means more energy (usually). World energy use of servers is around 1% of total electricity consumption. Making efficient computers is harder than making efficient refrigerators. Efficiency is computing speed divided by power usage. But that's too simple. For a server, you have to take into account the efficiency of the compute efficiency, server efficiency, and data center efficiency. These get multiplied together. Ugh. Data centers are underutilized which
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Velocity 08: Jiffy: Instrumenting and Measuring Web Performance

Mon Jun 23 10:52:00 2008

Scott Ruthfield from WhitePages.com is announcing a new open-source projects called Jiffy, a tool for measuring the end-to-end performance of Web sites (PDF slides). Jiffy provides real data about performance that is more complete and more fine grained than what you might get from Keynote or Gomez. Jiffy has four goals: Real data at scale - track 100% of page views Measure anything - pre load data access, each add, brand, when the form is ready, and so on Real-time reporting No impact on page performance Jiffy comprises a JavaScript library that instruments the pages, an Apache proxy, a
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Velocity Keynote: IT Operations are Unsustainable

Mon Jun 23 10:21:00 2008

Bill Coleman (the "B" in BEA) is giving the opening keynote titled Green Data Centers, but it's really about sustainable operations. He begins by saying that the current way we operate data centers is unsustainable. Operations costs are growing at twice the rate of IT in general. This is the unintended consequence of the success of networked operations. Scale and complexity have grown dramatically. Bill claims 5 orders of magnitude. In some organizations it can take 6 months to get a new server into the data center. If you do it faster than that, good for you. Virtualization is
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