Velocity preview at Web2.0 Expo

At the Web2.0 Expo this month we have a small preview of some of the topics and speakers at the Velocity Web Performance & Operations conference.  (Radar readers get a 20% discount by using "vel08js" as a discount code... and yes it works with the $300 early registration discount!).

Failure Happens
Friday @ 11:00 am, Room 2009

Artur Bergman and I will kick off the day with an entertaining/informative/eye-opening review of the year’s biggest failures, disasters, and painful lessons learned.

We'll review incidents by underlying root cause with a focus on what could have been done to prevent it. We promise not to be too harsh on anybody, although we will give special attention to particularly ironic failures or those that are "entertainingly coupled" to absurd marketing claims.

(Hint: Send your boss to this talk if they don't understand why you and your whole team need to go to Velocity.)

Even Faster Web Sites
Friday @ 1:30 pm, Room 2012

Steve Souders is the co-chair of Velocity and author of the bestselling book High Performance Web Sites. At the Expo last year Steve gave an incredibly popular talk on the 14 best practices he developed while working as the Chief Performance Yahoo!.

Now working at Google, Steve will explain the next set of best practices he's discovered, including the best ways to load JavaScript and where to place (and where not to place) inline scripts.

Capacity Planning for Web Operations
Friday @ 2:40 pm, Room 2012

John Allspaw will cover real-world challenges and lessons learned doing Capacity Management at Flickr.

Capacity planning for growth is not a new concept in web operations, but planning for the explosive and unpredictable types of growth that social applications experience is a whole new ballgame. John will focus on the following areas:

Measurement: Planning used to be driven only by server statistics and gut feelings. Social metrics also need to be taken into account as well as world events that could effect the community in unexpected ways.

Architecture: Making your application scalable isn’t the end of the story. Being capable of deploying capacity quickly isn’t an option, it’s a requirement.

Economics: Purchasing and deploying capacity too late can result in frustrated users and a stressed infrastructure. Deploying it too early can waste time and money.

Why Your Start-up Needs an Automated Infrastructure
Friday @ 3:30 pm, Room 2012

Adam Jacobs is a Founder of HJK Solutions which helps startups build stable, scalable, and repeatable infrastructures utilizing open-source tools.  (Adam is behind the iLike.com scaling success story.)

Providing efficient, automated operations is critical to new startups. In this session, we will show one method of building an automated infrastructure by presenting a live demonstration company in EC2. First we will cover all of the components necessary for any automated infrastructure to be successful.

Then we will present a series of use-cases, walking the audience through how each component interacts to help them solve real-world problems. Sample use cases are adding a new application server and application troubleshooting.

All the tools presented will be open source, and we’ll make sure that attendees have a handout detailing each of them (and a workflow of how they fit together).