"Ubiquitous Delivery" entries

Signals from the 2015 O’Reilly Velocity Conference in Santa Clara

Key insights from DevOps, Web operations, and performance.

People from across the Web operations and performance worlds are coming together this week for the 2015 O’Reilly Velocity Conference in Santa Clara. Below, we’ve assembled notable keynotes, interviews, and insights from the event.

Think like a villain

Laura Bell outlines a three-step approach to securing organizations — by putting yourself in the bad guy’s shoes (without committing actual crime, she stresses):

  1. Think like a villain and be objective: identify why and how someone would attack your company; what is the core value they’d come to steal?
  2. Create a safe place to create a little chaos: don’t do it live, but find a safe place without restriction and without fear to break things, to practice creative chaos.
  3. Play like you’ve never read the the rule book: Not everyone plays by the same rules as you, so to protect yourself and your company, you have to think more like the person willing to break the rules.

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Managed DNS considered harmful

Outsourcing your DNS is not a magic bullet.

bridge

There is frequently a tendency toward letting one’s guard down when it comes to threats to your IT systems. Absent an immediate “hair-on-fire” situation, we may relax and assume all is well. Yet malicious activity such as hacking, phishing, malware, and DDoS attacks never stop accelerating in terms of frequency and intensity.

So it’s important to have a “Plan B” DNS solution in place and ready before a crisis hits. That way, even if you’re taken off guard, you still have a backup plan and can respond appropriately.

DNS is one of those things nobody really thinks about, until it stops working. The first time easyDNS went off the air on April 15, 2003, it induced a type of existential crisis in me. That summer, after meditating intensely on the situation, I came away with the conclusion that the centralized managed DNS model, as we understood it then, was doomed.

My response at the time was a proposal to pivot to a DNS appliance with decentralized deployments, but centralized monitoring and management. That concept was promptly shot down my co-founders and we’ve kept on with the centralized, hosted DNS model to this day.

The core problem is this: there are many reasons to elect to outsource your DNS to a managed DNS provider. Those reasons include:

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Business at web speed

A "Coded Business" harnesses feedback loops, optimization, ubiquitous delivery, and other web-centric methods.

Business at web speed: A Coded Business harnesses feedback loops, optimization, ubiquitous delivery and other web-centric methods.

Seven years ago, Steve Souders and Jesse Robbins came to the realization that they both worked within “tribes” that, while ostensibly quite different, were talking about many of the same things. Front-end developers and engineers were figuring out how to make web pages faster and more reliable, and web operations folks were making deployments faster and more resilient.

And so goes the tale of how Velocity came to be — a conference that brought those tribes together and openly shared how to make the web faster and stronger. In those seven years, quite a lot has changed, and many ideas, terms, and technologies have come into being — some directly as a result of Velocity, others were already in the works. DevOps, Chef, Puppet, Continuous Delivery, HTTP Archive — these were the earlier forays. Soon to follow were AWS, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) products, many more monitoring tools, many more CDN vendors, WebPageTest, the explosion of the cloud, Chaos Monkey, mobile everything, Vagrant, Docker, and much, much more.

Out of the fire of Velocity came a New Way of doing things forged in a web-centric world. Along the way, something changed fundamentally about not just tech companies, but companies in general. As we looked around more recently, we realized it wasn’t just about the web and fast pages any more. Read more…