"infrastructure" entries
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…
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…
Steve Souders asks: "How green is your web page?"
Steve Souders, my Velocity conference Co-Chair and author of High Performance Websites, gave me permission to repost this great analysis: How green is your web page? Writing faster web pages is great for your users, which in turn is great for you and your company. But it’s better for everyone else on the planet, too. Intrigued by an article on…
Steve Souders asks: “How green is your web page?”
Steve Souders, my Velocity conference Co-Chair and author of High Performance Websites, gave me permission to repost this great analysis: How green is your web page? Writing faster web pages is great for your users, which in turn is great for you and your company. But it’s better for everyone else on the planet, too. Intrigued by an article on…
Operations is a competitive advantage… (Secret Sauce for Startups!)
My lunchtime conversations at the Summit centered around Operations as a competitive advantage (and occasionally a "strategic weapon"). This advantage is the ability to consistently create and deploy reliable software to an unreliable platform that scales horizontally. Many people think of Operations as "a bunch of boring work… which I'm hoping someone else is doing." It often takes less…
Failure Happens: A summary of the power outage at 365 Main
Datacenter provider 365 Main released their initial report from Tuesday's power failure which affected Craigslist, Technorati, Yelp, TypePad, LiveJournal, Vox, and others. This outage is an excellent example of complex systems failure, and so I'll be using it as the basis for my next few posts on Operations. This is my own analysis using publicly available data. The 365main site…