Flickr

Convincing management that cooperation and collaboration was worth it

January 5, 2012

While searching around for something else, I came across this note I sent in late 2009 to the executive leadership of Yahoo’s Engineering organization. This was when I was leaving Flickr to work at Etsy. My intent on sending it was to be open to the rest of Yahoo about what how things worked at [...]

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MTTR is more important than MTBF (for most types of F)

November 7, 2010

This week I gave a talk at QCon SF about development and operations cooperation at Etsy and Flickr.  It’s a refresh of talks I’ve given in the past, with more detail about how it’s going at Etsy. (It’s going excellently ) There’s a bunch of topics in the presentation slides, all centered around roles, responsibilities, [...]

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Slides from Web2.0 Expo 2009. (and somethin else interestin’)

April 3, 2009

That was a pretty good time. Saw lots of good and wicked smaht people, and I got a lot of great questions after my talk. The slides are up on slideshare, and here are the PDF slides. Operational Efficiency Hacks Web20 Expo2009 View more presentations from John Allspaw. UPDATE: Gil Raphaelli has posted his python [...]

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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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Slides from Velocity

June 25, 2008

Here are the slides from my talk at the Velocity Conference.

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Squid patch for making “time” stats more meaningful.

May 22, 2008

Thanks to Mark, squid’s got a patch I’ve been wanting for a gazillion years: time-to-serve statistics that don’t include the client’s location http://www.squid-cache.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=2345 Normally, squid’s kept statistics that included the “time” to serve an object, whether it be a HIT, MISS, NEAR HIT, etc. The clock starts for this time when the first headers are [...]

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Flickr’s hiring a dba.

January 30, 2008

(Only hardworking supernerds should apply) We’re looking for an experienced and motivated MySQL DBA to help make things go at Flickr. Stuff you’ll do: • Work with engineers on performance tuning, query optimization, index tuning. • Monitor databases for problems and to diagnose where those problems are. • Work with developers and operations to maintain [...]

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Making a site faster by removing machines

August 20, 2007

(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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Varnish and the state of web caching

December 16, 2006

So there’s lots of excitement around Varnish, which is a caching proxy that is built to be first and foremost a reverse-proxy, as opposed to squid, which does both forward and reverse. Acceleration (reverse-proxying) is obviously important to us at Flickr, as we use squid extensively.

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Hats and beards

December 12, 2006

http://flickr.com/photos/allspaw/311471361/

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