Several people have asked me about the differences between Om Malik’s Structure conference and our Velocity Web Performance & Operations conference. Velocity is on June 23 & 24th at the SFO Mariott, and Structure follows on June 25th in San Francisco.
The conferences are complementary: Structure discusses what is changing in internet infrastructure, and Velocity teaches how to make that change happen.
I’ve been recommending that anyone considering Structure make sure their engineering teams are going to Velocity. For many technical leaders I think there is value in attending both, and I definitely plan on doing so.
The knowledge and skills learned at Velocity can be put to immediate use and will have significant impact on your business. The reason for this is simple:
Faster, scalable, and highly available websites serve more pages to more customers in the same amount of time.
That’s why we’ve worked hard to make Velocity the best resource for engineers to learn how to build and operate at web scale. Here are a few examples:
Adam Jacob will give a step-by-step overview of Building an Automated
Infrastructure, and then Luke Kanies will follow up with an in-depth
session on Puppet. This is the exact combination I used to explain how
effective operations is a huge competitive advantage:
Luiz Barroso will describe Google’s approach to energy-efficient datacenter design and management. Applying these lessons can ultimately save millions of dollars, increase your operational agility, and decrease your environmental footprint.
Mandi Walls will teach how actionable logging can mean
the difference between a 20-minute outage and a 2-hour outage while
esoteric error codes are deciphered or developers are contacted to
investigate.
Eric Lawrence, Program Manager for Internet Explorer, and Mike Connor, lead developer for Mozilla Firefox will explain how to optimize page performance for their respective browsers. We’ll also have demos of leading performance testing tools: HTTPwatch, Fiddler, AOL PageTest, and Firebug.
John Allspaw from Flickr will be be giving a talk about Capacity Management. John’s way of explaining both the problem and the opportunity is wonderfully straightforward:
You can check out the rest of the program and register on the Velocity site. (Hint: You can use the code “vel08js” for a 20% discount.) I’ll be posting frequently as we add speakers and events. I hope to see you at Velocity!