Tools

A Mature Role for Automation: Part I

September 21, 2012

I’ve been percolating on this post for a long time. Thanks very much to Mark Burgess for reviewing early drafts of it. One of the ideas that permeates our field of web operations is that we can’t have enough automation. You’ll see experience with “building automation” on almost every job description, and many post-mortem transcriptions [...]

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Meanwhile: More Meta-Metrics

October 5, 2009

Like all sane web organizations, we gather metrics about our infrastructure and applications. As many metrics as we can, as often as we can. These metrics, given the right context, helps us figure out all sorts of things about our application, infrastructure, processes, and business. Things such as… What: …did we do before (historical trending, [...]

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Uncaching bits in filesystem cache

July 9, 2009

Domas makes something more useful than I bet most would think: http://mituzas.lt/2009/06/26/uncache/

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Slides for Velocity Talk 2009

June 23, 2009

UPDATE: blip.tv has the video of the talk as well, below. Jeez I have some major bed-head. That was a blast! I had never done a ‘duet’ talk before. Here are the slides: 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr …and the video of it is here:

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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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Speaking at Web2.0 Expo 2009

February 19, 2009

Looks like I’m gonna talk about even more nerdy things at the Web2.0 Expo in April. You don’t have to wait for a recession to tighten up your operations. Squeezing more oomph out of your servers (or instances!) is always a good thing, and streamlining how you handle site issues is too. We’ll will talk [...]

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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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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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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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Tool update: WTF is inside filesystem cache ?

March 27, 2008

Awhile back, I said I’d love to have a tool that would allow me to peek inside filesystem cache and tell me what files (or pages of files) are inside. Well Peter Zaitsev points to the fincore tool, which comes pretty damn close: you give it a file, and it will tell you which pages [...]

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