"velocity08" entries
Video of Rich Wolski's EUCALYPTUS talk at Velocity
Rich Wolski gave a truly impressive talk at Velocity about an open-source software infrastructure for cloud computing called EUCALYPTUS . The API is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, and the underlying infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly-available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain. Watch and learn……
Hyperic CloudStatus service dashboard launches at Velocity!
Javier Soltero just launched CloudStatus during his Hyperic sponsor session today at Velocity. CloudStatus is a public health dashboard for web services like Amazon's EC2/S3, and Google's App Engine. Javier called to tell me about this last week after I declared that "Service Monitoring Dashboards are mandatory". This comes right after Amazon and Google had visible outages, and couldn't have…
Two new open source projects at Velocity
At Velocity next week there will be two significant open source projects debuting. The first is the Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation tool created by Scott Ruthfield and his team at Whitepages.com. Most tools for measuring web performance come in two flavors: Developer-installed tools (Firebug, Fiddler, etc.) that allow individuals to closely trace single sessions Third-party performance monitoring…
Understanding Web Operations Culture (Part 1)
“You don’t choose the moment, the moment chooses you. You only choose how prepared you are when it does.” – Fire Chief Mike Burtch (Note: I became a Firefighter-1 and EMT in 2000. My experiences in the fire service profoundly influence my efforts in technology. Much of my work over the past few years has been translating and distilling my…
Bill Coleman to keynote Velocity
Bill Coleman has twice transformed our industry, and I'm excited to announce that he will keynote Velocity later this month. Bill is most famous for being the "B" in BEA and for leading the creation of Solaris while at Sun. He is now the CEO of his new startup, Cassatt, which "makes Data Centers more efficient". Bill is awesome and…
TLS Report grades and reports on site security
My friend Ben Black just released TLS Report, a free (ad-supported) tool that evaluates SSL/TLS configurations across websites and assigns letter grades. In the example below, Facebook gets a D because it accepts several keys that are below 128-bits and relies on MD5: Ben explains: Cryptography is arcane and complex. Cryptography is also the basis for the various protocols that…
Twitter Availability & Response Times: A Mixed Bag
From an all-time low of 76% registered on May 20th of this year, Pingdom.com’s uptime statistics for Twitter has slowly been increasing. Ideally, you want extended stretches of near 100% uptime, something that hasn’t occurred since mid April: Daily uptime has hovered around 98% over the last week. Sound impressive? To put things in perspective, 2% downtime means that twitter.com/home…
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…
The battle for the cloud
Andy Kessler has a great op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, The War for the Web: Microsoft was smart to walk away (for now) from its $44 billion bid for Yahoo. It's never good to overpay. But the software giant – whose stock has flatlined for eight years – was onto the right strategy in looking to the Web…