Web Operations

Web Operations. By John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins, O’Reilly 2010, with a chapter by myself. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site).

I wrote a chapter for this book, and it’s now on shelves in bookstores near you. I got my dead-tree copy today and read everyone else’s contributions to it. It’s a good book. A group effort such as this one is necessarily going to have some differences in style and even overlapping content, but overall it works very well.

A common problem I see people running into when using a cloud computing service is the trap of under-provisioning. There’s a chain effect that leads to this result: 1) people don’t understand how virtualization works, and therefore 2) they don’t realize how much of a computing resource they’re really buying, so 3) they assume they are entitled to more than they really are, and 4) they under-provision. A few other causes and effects come into play here, too. For example, the choice to use the cloud is sometimes founded on economic assumptions that frequently turn out to be wrong. The cloud service looks more economically attractive than it really is, due to under-provisioning.

Let’s get back to this idea that people under-provision. How do I know that’s happening? I’ll use anecdotal evidence to illustrate.

Having written about what I think is cool about the upcoming MySQL Conference and the MySQL Camp, now I want to finish up with what I’d like to see at the Percona Performance Conference. Just to recap, this is a conference we created to serve those who want to learn about performance — not “learn about MySQL,” not “learn about database performance,” just learn about performance, period.

I want to see everything. I think this is going to be the single best conference I’ve ever been to. Even the way the conference is organized is exciting. For example, it’s running from early morning till late at night, nonstop. The sessions are also (mostly) only 25 minutes. This means if you decide a session isn’t all that interesting, you

My friends Theo Schlossnagle, Laura Thomson and Chris Shiflett are each presenting at ApacheCon Europe. They are each excellent presenters with solid content - I have seen Theo present at a previous ApacheCon, caught Laura at several OSCONs and finally saw Shiflett speak at the PHP Quebec conference earlier this year.

The deal is simple - sign up for any of their tutorials before the early bird deadline for the conference closes (on June 6th) and get complementary copies of some of the speaker’s book(s).

The sessions are:

• Advanced Production Troubleshooting Techniques (Theo Schlossnagle)