Kitchen Soap

So now there’s chapters 1-4 on Safari RoughCuts. Which means if you don’t mind shelling out the dough, you can take a look at what I’ve been getting up early for every day for the past few months. The working title is “The Art of Capacity Planning” and it’s meant to be a no-nonsense description [...]

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Here they are.

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Dear users of S3, EC2, and other ‘utility’ computing stuffs:
Here’s a crude and completely oversimplified evolution of infrastructure needs of a growing website, with an assumption:

Have you ‘outgrown’ your original use of utility computing, for whatever reason ? If so, what was the reason? Financial? Technical?
Why I’m asking:
I’m in the process of writing a [...]

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I’m probably late in getting to this, but seeing the article in the WSJ about the RAD project made me stop to take a look. It appears to be a collection of different projects, all relating to infrastructure deployment/management and various research topics surrounding it. Looks cool so far.

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I’m probably very late to this party, but I just discovered Dashboard Spy. Given the amount of “data porn” that folks in webops look at on a daily basis, this sort of stuff is pretty damn interesting.
I’m especially loving the current trend of developing ‘business’ dashboards, since it can fit in quite nicely with infrastructure [...]

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I’m gonna give a talk in capacity planning for web operations at the Web 2.0 Expo in April. Wondering if I should submit the same sort of talk for the Velocity conference in June. Don’t want to be redundant or anything.

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If you consider that you and your users are in some sort of a ‘relationship’, then good communication is pretty important. The Rackspace datacenter outage reminds me yet again that we’re lucky to have a handful of servers in more than one datacenter that can communicate to users in the case where we’ve lost one [...]

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“Do you know when your database layer will fall over and die ? At how many QPS (queries per second) will your application fall prey to slowness, corruption, replication issues, or other sorts of badness ?”
I asked that question of the audience when giving a talk on capacity planning at the MySQL conference last year, [...]

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No matter what sort of capacity planning tricks you think you have up your sleeve, if it doesn’t involve the procurement process, then you can’t call it planning.
Procurement is the part that happens after you know what kind and how much capacity you need. It’s the part where you, someone in some other group like [...]

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(well, not really)
A little while ago, in one of our clusters we replaced a boatload of PowerEdge 1425 webserver-class boxes with a much smaller number of HP DL145 G3 quad-core boxes, getting the same amount of oomph from 1/3 the boxes. Not too bad.

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