WebOps

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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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 [...]

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Some Web Operations rules

October 5, 2007

I don’t think I know Jon Prall, but I’m sure I must have seen him “around” in this small world of social media websites. He’s got a list of his 85 rules of Web Operations, some of which I agree with wholeheartedly. Reminds me to get #42 and #43 done one of these days.

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The term “monitoring” needs clarification.

September 26, 2007

WebOps-related mailing lists have always had a problem with this vague term, and I suspect that commercial vendors exploit this confusion. Wikipedia gives a pretty vague definition: “…is the process of testing or tracking (monitoring) how end-users interact with a website or web application.” People use the term to describe lots of things that pertain [...]

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