More than 700 performance and operations engineers were in London last week for Velocity Europe 2012. Below, Velocity co-chairs Steve Souders and John Allspaw note high-level themes from across the various tracks (especially the hallway track) that are emerging for the WPO and DevOps communities.

Performance themes from Steve Souders

I was in awe of the speaker and exhibitor lineup going into Velocity Europe. It was filled with knowledgeable gurus and industry leaders. As Velocity Europe unfolded a few themes kept recurring, and I wanted to share those with you.

Performance matters more — The places and ways that web performance matters keeps growing. The talks at Velocity covered desktop, mobile (native, web, and hybrid), tablet, TV, DSL, cable, FiOS, 3G, 4G, LTE, and WiMAX across social, financial, ecommerce, media, games, sports, video, search, analytics, advertising, and enterprise. Although all of the speakers were technical, they talked about how the focus on performance extends to other departments in their companies as well as the impact performance has on their users. Web performance has permeated all aspects of the web and has become a primary focus for web companies.

Organizational challenges are the hardest — Lonely Planet and SoundCloud talked about how the challenges in shifting their organizational culture to focus on performance were more difficult than the technical work required to actually improve performance. During the hallway track, myself and a few other speakers were asked about ways to initiate this culture shift. There’s growing interest in figuring out how to change a company’s culture to value and invest in performance. This reminded me of our theme from Velocity 2009, the impact of performance and operations on the bottom line, where we brought in case studies that described the benefits of web performance using the vocabulary of the business. In 2013 I predict we’ll see a heavier emphasis on case studies and best practices for making performance a priority for the organization using a slightly different vocabulary, with terms like “culture,” “buy-in” and “DNA.”

The community is huge — As of today there are 42 web performance meetup groups totaling nearly 15,000 members worldwide: 15,000 members just over three years! In addition to meetup groups, Aaron Kulick and Stephen Thair organized the inaugural WebPerfDays events in Santa Clara, Calif. and London (respectively). WebPerfDays, modelled after DevOpsDays, is an unconference for the web performance community organized by the web performance community. Although these two events coincided with Velocity, the intent is that anyone in the world can use the resources (templates, website, Twitter handle, etc.) to organize their own WebPerfDays. A growing web performance community means more projects, events, analyses, etc. reaching more people. I encourage you to attend your local web performance meetup group. If there isn’t one, then organize it. And consider organizing your own WebPerfDays as a one-day mini-Velocity in your own backyard.

Operations themes from John Allspaw

As if it was an extension of what we saw at Velocity U.S., there were a number of talks that underscored the importance of the human factor in web operations. I gave a tutorial called “Escalating Scenarios: A Deep Dive Into Outage Pitfalls” that mostly centered around the situations when ops teams find themselves responding to complex failure scenarios. Stephen Nelson-Smith gave a whirlwind tour of patterns and anti-patterns on workflows and getting things done in an engineering and operations context.

Gene Kim, Damon Edwards, John Willis, and Patrick Debois looked at the fundamentals surrounding development and operations cooperation and collaboration, in “DevOps Patterns Distilled.” Mike Rembetsy and Patrick McDonnell followed up with the implementation of those fundamentals at Etsy over a four-year period.

Theo Schlossnagle, ever the “dig deep” engineer, spoke on monitoring and observability. He gave some pretty surgical techniques for peering into production infrastructure in order to get an idea of what’s going on under the hood, with DTrace and tcpdump.

A number of talks covered handling large-scale growth:

• The BBC spoke about preparing for the onslaught of traffic that was going to come with the London Olympics.
• Instagram gave details about their skyrocketing growth over a short period of time with a very small team.
• ChinaCache gave details about the ins and outs of serving traffic across an entire continent: Asia.

These are just a few of the highlights we saw at Velocity Europe in London. As usual, half the fun was the hallway track: engineers trading stories, details, and approaches over food and drink. A fun and educational time was had by all.

This event has been a long time coming. A handful of web performance and operations savants (including members of the Program Committee) have been encouraging us for years to bring Velocity to Europe, and now it’s actually happening. And (drum roll please) the price is only EUR 600 (excl. VAT) if you use the 20% discount code veu11sts.

The Velocity Europe speaker line-up is exceptional. Some highlights include:

• Jon Jenkins from Amazon.com is talking about their approach to the challenges of mobile browsing. Jon is the Director of Software Development for Amazon Silk. I’m looking forward to more details about Silk’s split architecture.
• Tim Morrow delivers the background for Betfair’s promise to deliver a fast experience to their customers, and their progress on that promise.
• Theo Schlossnagle is a recognized leader at Velocity. He’s giving two talks on web operations careers and monitoring.
• Estelle Weyl joins Velocity for the first time talking about the nuances of mobile rendering performance. I learn something new every time I hear Estelle speak, so I’m excited to welcome her to Velocity.
• Ivo Teel discusses the balance we all face between features and performance and how they’re handling that at Spil Games.
• Jeff Veen knows the importance of third-party performance and availability as the CEO of Typekit. Jeff is an amazing, engaging speaker. Reading his session description gave me goosebumps with anticipation: “Jeff sat on a couch in the Typekit offices, staring out the window, and wondering if everything their company had been working towards was about to slip through their fingers …“

There’s much much more – lightning demos, browser vendor talks, John Allspaw on anticipating failure, David Mandelin on JavaScript performance – I’ve got to stop here but please check out the entire schedule.

I want to give a shout out to the Velocity Europe Program Committee: Patrick Debois, Aaron Peters, Schlomo Schapiro, Jeroen Tjepkema, and Sean Treadway. They’ve participated in numerous video concalls (yay Google Hangouts!) to review proposals, build the program, and shape Velocity to be a European conference. And they might have one more card up their sleeve – more on that later.

If you’re heading to Berlin you should also check out CounchConf Berlin on Nov 7. NoSQL has great performance benefits and Couchbase is a good choice for many mobile apps. Use couchconf_discount for 10% off registration.

The last time I was in Berlin was for JSConf.eu 2009. The city had a high-tech vibe and the crowd was extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic. I’m excited to get back to Berlin for Velocity Europe and do the web performance and operations deep dives that are the core of Velocity. If you want to have a website that’s always fast and always up, Velocity Europe is the place to be. I hope to see you there.

Velocity Europe, being held Nov. 8-9 in Berlin, will bring together the web operations and performance communities for two days of critical training, best practices, and case studies.

Save 20% on registration with the code veu11sts

Related:

• Velocity is coming to Europe
• How the Velocity tribe is pushing the web forward
• Why speed matters
• The state of speed and the quirks of mobile optimization
• How resilience engineering applies to the web world

Sample some of the tweets to see the reaction of attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors.

Several folks on the
#velocityconf Twitter stream have been asking about slides and videos.
You can find those on the Velocity Slides and Videos page.
There are about 25 slide decks up there right now.
The rest of the slides will be posted as we receive them from the speakers.
Videos of all the keynotes will be made available for free.
Several are there already posted, including
“Career Development” by Theo Schlossnagle,
“JavaScript & Metaperformance” by Doug Crockford,
and
“Look at Your Data” by the omni-awesome John Rauser.
Videos of every afternoon session are also available via the
Velocity Online Access Pass ($495).

Velocity 2011 had a great crowd with a lot of energy.
Check out the Velocity photos to get a feel for what was happening.
We had more women speakers than ever before and I was psyched when I saw this
photo of the Women’s Networking Meet Up that took place during the conference (also posted above).

Velocity 2011: Take-aways, Trends, and Highlights — In this webcast following Velocity 2011, program chairs Steve Souders and John Allspaw will identify and discuss key trends and announcements that came out of the event and how they will impact the web industry in the year to come.

Join us on Friday, June 24, 2011, at 10 am PT
Register for this free webcast

Make sure to check out all the
announcements that were made at Velocity.
There were a couple big announcements about Velocity itself, including:

• After four years
  Jesse Robbins
  is passing the co-chair mantle to
  John Allspaw.
  I worked with John at Yahoo! when he was with Flickr. John is VP of Tech Ops at Etsy now.
  He stepped into many of the co-chair duties at this Velocity in preparation for taking on the role at the next Velocity.
• Speaking of the next Velocity, we announced there will be a Velocity Europe in November in Berlin.
  The exact venue and dates will be announced soon, followed quickly by a call for proposals.
  We’re extremely excited about expanding Velocity to Europe and look forward to connecting with the performance and operations communities there,
  and helping grow the WPO and devops industries in that part of the world.
  In addition, the second Velocity China will be held in Beijing in December 2011.
• And of course we’ll be back next June for our fifth year of Velocity here in the Bay Area.

I covered a lot in this post and didn’t even talk about any of the themes, trends, and takeaways.
John and I will be doing that at the
Velocity Wrap-up Webcast
on Friday, June 24 at 10am PT. It’s free so invite your friends and colleagues to join in.

Related:

• A tribe of web performance and operations pros is pushing the web forward
• Velocity grows with more tracks, more topics and … bath products?

Jesse Robbins and I, the Velocity co-chairs, were there at the 2007 meeting with Tim O’Reilly and team to brainstorm the idea.
Back then devops and frontend engineering were emerging disciplines in need of a gathering place.
O’Reilly Media, the seeker and shepherd of alpha geeks, recognized the importance of this community and the need for a place to exchange and evangelize best practices.
It was time to build a home where these tribes could gather.

Velocity started in 2008 as a two-day, two-track conference with 600 attendees.
In 2009 we added a third day for workshops and reached 700 attendees.
Velocity 2010 saw the addition of a third track dubbed “Velocity Culture”
and was our biggest year with 1,200 attendees (double the audience from just two years earlier).

In 2010 we rolled out Velocity China
which sold out. This was O’Reilly’s first technology conference in China and the audience was incredibly enthusiastic.

How’s Velocity 2011 look? One change is the new track on Mobile Performance, something everyone is thinking about. A fourth track, Products & Services, has been added.
And we’re on a path to surpass 2010′s attendance records.
(I love breaking benchmarks!)

Just when I thought we had taken Velocity to the max, I received a package from
John Allspaw and Mike Brittain
over at Etsy
containing these Velocity bath and body products (right).
I was incredibly excited, but two issues jumped out at me immediately.
First, would people be able to set aside the jokes about sysadmins and hygiene?
Second, Velocity isn’t just “for men” as the label indicates. In fact, this year we broke another record with more women speakers than ever before.

We’ll keep our focus on delivering a high-quality Velocity conference and leave Velocity bath products to someone else. The furthest we’ll stray is clothing — we’ve got another great Velocity t-shirt in store for attendees.

If you’re not registered please do that now. Last year we exceeded capacity and had to close walkup registrations. Go to Velocity registration and use the code VEL11RAD to get a 20% discount. Join the rest of the performance and devops community in making this the biggest, best Velocity ever. Jesse and I look forward to seeing you there.

Velocity 2011, being held June 14-16 in Santa Clara, Calif., offers the skills and tools you need to master web performance and operations.

Save 20% on registration with the code VEL11RAD

Related Velocity coverage:

• How resilience engineering applies to the web world
• How the cloud helps Netflix
• Why speed matters

That question was answered at Velocity last week by speakers from AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Shopzilla.

• Eric Schurman (Bing) and Jake Brutlag (Google Search) co-presented results from latency experiments conducted independently on each site. Bing found that a 2 second slowdown changed queries/user by -1.8% and revenue/user by -4.3%. Google Search found that a 400 millisecond delay resulted in a -0.59% change in searches/user. What’s more, even after the delay was removed, these users still had -0.21% fewer searches, indicating that a slower user experience affects long term behavior. (video, slides)
• Dave Artz from AOL presented several performance suggestions. He concluded with statistics that show page views drop off as page load times increase. Users in the top decile of page load times view ~7.5 pages/visit. This drops to ~6 pages/visit in the 3rd decile, and bottoms out at ~5 pages/visit for users with the slowest page load times. (slides)
• Marissa Mayer shared several performance case studies from Google. One experiment increased the number of search results per page from 10 to 30, with a corresponding increase in page load times from 400 milliseconds to 900 milliseconds. This resulted in a 25% dropoff in first result page searches. Adding the checkout icon (a shopping cart) to search results made the page 2% slower with a corresponding 2% drop in searches/user. (Watch the video to see the clever workaround they found.) Image optimizations in Google Maps made the page 2-3x faster, with significant increase in user interaction with the site. (video, slides)
• Phil Dixon, from Shopzilla, had the most takeaway statistics about the impact of performance on the bottom line. A year-long performance redesign resulted in a 5 second speed up (from ~7 seconds to ~2 seconds). This resulted in a 25% increase in page views, a 7-12% increase in revenue, and a 50% reduction in hardware. This last point shows the win-win of performance improvements, increasing revenue while driving down operating costs. (video, slides)

These case studies provide real world numbers that show the benefits of making your site faster. Other Velocity sessions share techniques for implementing performance improvements, including sessions from me, Doug Crockford, and the Facebook and Google frontend teams. But what about the user experience? In his session, Matt Mullenweg (of WordPress fame) makes sure we remember the importance of how the user feels while interacting with our site:

That’s why [performance] is important and why we should be obsessed
and not be discouraged when it doesn’t change the funnel. My theory here
is when an interface is faster, you feel good. And ultimately what that
comes down to is you feel in control. The web app isn’t controlling me,
I’m controlling it. Ultimately that feeling of control translates to
happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world,
we all have to keep working on this.

Thanks to the Velocity speakers & their organizations for overcoming the many challenges required to present this data for the first time. We’re now equipped with the financial justification, the technical know-how, and the visceral motivation to go out and make the Web a faster place. We’ll have more performance success stories next year. Your company could be one of them! Capture your performance improvements and bottom line impact. We’d love to hear from you at Velocity 2010.