Thoughts on systems safety, software operations, and sociotechnical systems.
The CFP for next year’s Velocity Conference is up now, so all you ops and performance ninjas submit your ideas for talks. I’m lucky enough to be on the program committee this year, and I think the conference is a huge opportunity to spread the ops love on all kinds of topics. There’s a list […]
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 […]
Via kottke: some good examples of doing rough math in your head, causing you to guess about assumptions all along the way. IMHO, being able to do this is one of the things that makes a good web ops person. The examples might be “useless”, but the process is invaluable.
James Hamilton’s excellent LADIS 2008 presentation has lots of great stuff in it about internet scale bits. Cool stats.
Here are the slides from my talk at the Velocity Conference.
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 […]
Read more Squid patch for making “time” stats more meaningful.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
(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 […]