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Kitchen Soap

Thoughts on systems safety, software operations, and sociotechnical systems.

I wrote a book about common sense.

Whew. That took longer than I thought. Todd Hoff over at the High Scalability blog has an email interview with me about a book that I wrote, called “The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources“.  I’m still just happy that I got it done at all, seeing how it was due the same week […]

Read more I wrote a book about common sense.

More back-of-envelope-math…

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.

Read more More back-of-envelope-math…

Varnish and squid, *again*

Just listened to Artur railing against squid and preaching the virtues of varnish. He quoted what most people quoted, which is how varnish performs serving out of *memory*. It must be nice to have a working set that small. Until someone can show me numbers of disk-intensive (meaning, full caches, LRU eviction churning all the […]

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This just in: *anything* having to do with servers is a “cloud”! Yay!

From this article on BusinesWeek: In addition, through its Data Center Solutions Group, Dell builds clouds, the large groups of computers whose collective power can be tapped remotely, via the Internet. Customers for DCS-built clouds include Yahoo! (YHOO), Facebook, and Akamai (AKAM) as well as big Chinese Internet companies like Baidu (BIDU), Tudou, Tencent Holdings, […]

Read more This just in: *anything* having to do with servers is a “cloud”! Yay!