From the category archives:

WebOps

Slides from Velocity

June 25, 2008

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

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 received by [...]

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WebOps Communication Tools

March 10, 2008

After seeing Jesse’s great post on Radar (never knew about FreeConferenceCall, very cool!) about the quick and easy webops event communications, I thought I might put a post together on some of what we’re using at Flickr to keep track of things ops-related.
Production Changes/Immediate Issues
We have our configuration management schemes wrapped up in version control, [...]

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Too big to use utility computing ?

February 27, 2008

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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Loving Dashboard Spy.

February 17, 2008

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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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 a scalable, reliable, and robust [...]

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Speaking at Web 2.0 Expo 2008

January 3, 2008

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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A new place for Web Ops to talk the talk and walk the walk

November 15, 2007

There’s a new conference in town, and it looks to have the really good schmitz. Good work Jesse and Steve, I’m really looking forward to this.

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Datacenters can suck. Communication can be great.

November 13, 2007

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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Knowing when you can fail is mandatory.

October 11, 2007

“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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