2008

Web Ops Visualizations Group on Flickr

December 16, 2008

Like lots of operations people, we’re quite addicted to data pr0n here at Flickr. We’ve got graphs for pretty much everything, and add graphs all of the time. We’ve blogged about some of how and why we do it. One thing we’re in the habit of is screenshotting these graphs when things go wrong, right, [...]

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2009 Velocity Conference submissions are open!

November 20, 2008

The CFP for next year’s Velocity Conference is up now, so all you ops and performance ninjas submit your ideas for talks. I’m lucky enough to be on the program committee this year, and I think the conference is a huge opportunity to spread the ops love on all kinds of topics. There’s a list [...]

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Code Swarm for Config Management

October 21, 2008

Gil Raphaelli, one of the guys on our Flickr Ops team, put together a Code Swarm animation for the configuration/deployment management tool we use at Flickr to manage our infrastructure. Myles Grant did this for our bug reporting system as well. Check it out: Our automated config management system is called Gemstone, but conceptually you [...]

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I wrote a book about common sense.

October 6, 2008

Whew. That took longer than I thought. Todd Hoff over at the High Scalability blog has an email interview with me about a book that I wrote, called “The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources“. I’m still just happy that I got it done at all, seeing how it was due the same week [...]

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More back-of-envelope-math…

September 18, 2008

Via kottke: some good examples of doing rough math in your head, causing you to guess about assumptions all along the way. IMHO, being able to do this is one of the things that makes a good web ops person. The examples might be “useless”, but the process is invaluable.

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Internet-Scale Efficiency

September 16, 2008

James Hamilton’s excellent LADIS 2008 presentation has lots of great stuff in it about internet scale bits. Cool stats.

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Why we use GraphicsMagick

September 2, 2008

Speed: http://www.graphicsmagick.org/www/BENCHMARKS.html Also, it looks like the GM devs are working on getting OpenMP (parallelism) put into GM processing, which will be a huge boom for multicore boxes. Yay!

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Everything isn’t about the Knuth quote

August 24, 2008

It’s hard to describe how tiring it is to hear someone quote Donald Knuth (or Tony Hoare) in the wrong context. I’m not the only one annoyed by this. In “Structured Programming with go to Statements”, Knuth says: We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root [...]

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