Jesse Robbins

Jesse Robbins (@jesserobbins) is CEO of Opscode and a recognized expert in Infrastructure, Web Operations, and Emergency Management.

He serves as co-chair of the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference and contributes to the O’Reilly Radar. Prior to co-founding Opscode, he worked at Amazon.com with a title of “Master of Disaster” where he was responsible for Website Availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand.

Robbins is a volunteer Firefighter/EMT and Emergency Manager, and led a task force deployed in Operation Hurricane Katrina. His experiences in the fire service profoundly influence his efforts in technology, and he strives to distill his knowledge from these two worlds and apply it in service of both.

Ignite! @ Velocity: Submit your talks & "war stories"…

Velocity is next month, and we're doing a special Ignite! on Monday, June 23rd at 8:45 pm. This event is free and will be open to all. There will be a cash bar. We will be doing 16 talks. Each Ignite! talk is 5 minutes long with 20 slides and only 15 seconds a slide. There are still of slots…

Burmese translation of Sahana complete!

Eduardo Jezierski and the team at InSTEDD have been leading an incredible effort to translate and localize the Sahana humanitarian aid system to Burmese. They were nearly complete when they took the stage this week at Where2.0 (video soon), and it looks like they have finished the last line. Ed explained the effort on the InSTEDD blog: Juan was instrumental…

Automated Infrastructure Podcast on IT Conversations

Adam Jacob and I did an IT Conversations podcast with Phil Windley last week, which I really enjoyed. We started with a summary of Adam's excellent Web2.0 Expo session, covered the phases of startup growth using virtual infrastructures like EC2 and 3tera, and discussed how Puppet shifts us to "Infrastructure as Code". We even got into the challenges and opportunities…

Structure and Velocity

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…

Disaster Technology for Myanmar/Burma aid workers

There is an ongoing crisis in Myanmar (Burma) in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. The ruling military junta is finally allowing humanitarian organizations into the region after denying access for almost a week. The situation is grim, and you can help by donating to organizations like: Doctors without Borders, Direct Relief, and UNICEF. There has been some incredible discussion on…

You Become what You Disrupt – (part two)

Google's GrandCentral (Radar coverage) was down over the weekend resulting in missed calls and other phone problems for its users. This is very similar to the the two day Skype outage last year where I said that "You Become what You Disrupt". I've spoken about this issue several times, most recently at the Princeton CITP "Computing in the Cloud" workshop….

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 HappensFriday @ 11:00 am, Room 2009 Artur Bergman and I…

Data Center heating the Town Pool

According to GreenerComputing.com: A public swimming pool in Zurich will soon be heated for the comfort of local residents, thanks to an innovative solution: heat generated by a data center that would otherwise be classified as waste. The new data center in Zurich is one of three projects in Europe and the Middle East that IBM has announced in recent…

What is Web Operations?

Theo Schlossnagle wrote a brilliant summary of one of the biggest challenges we discussed at the Velocity Summit in January:What is this Velocity Summit thing? It was a bunch of web architects from highly trafficked sites sitting around talkin' smack. It was operated in Foo style. However, one thing that made me really appreciate this meet-up was the lack of…

Amazon improves EC2 (by embracing failure)

Amazon just announced two big improvements to EC2: Multiple LocationsAmazon EC2 now provides the ability to place instances in multiple locations. Amazon EC2 locations are composed of regions and Availability Zones. Regions are geographically dispersed and will be in separate geographic areas or countries. Currently, Amazon EC2 exposes only a single region. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered…