How Complex Systems Fail: A WebOps Perspective

I guess I’m late on getting to this, but How Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook is excellent. Let me start with this: I don’t think I can overstate how right-on this paper is, with respect to the challenges, solutions, observations, and concerns involved with operating a medium to large web infrastructure. I found this...
Continue reading...

Meanwhile: More Meta-Metrics

Like all sane web organizations, we gather metrics about our infrastructure and applications. As many metrics as we can, as often as we can. These metrics, given the right context, helps us figure out all sorts of things about our application, infrastructure, processes, and business. Things such as… What: …did we do before (historical trending,...
Continue reading...

WebOps: Good prep for becoming a new parent?

I think I’ve said before somewhere that working in the field of web operations prepared me somewhat for being a parent. I thought the other day that I should write down some of this reasoning, because it’s pretty often that I’m reminded of similarities: High availability Having redundant infrastructure is WebOps 101. For my kids’...
Continue reading...

Automated Control paper by the RAD Lab folks

Wow, how did I miss this until now? In June, some smart people gathered in Barcelona for the First Workshop on Automated Control for Datacenters and Clouds (ACDC09) and jeez it looked like it was a good time, from a glance at the program. One of the cooler papers is “Automatic exploration of datacenter performance regimes”...
Continue reading...

Extreme Automated Infrastructure

I’ve said it before that I’ve always been a huge fan of SystemImager, for super simple imaging. It has some shortcomings for config management, but those are solved with things like Chef or Puppet. With all of the great things being talked about surrounding ‘Automated Infrastructure’, I’ll point to something insanely cool: 1,190 nodes installed...
Continue reading...

SLAs, clouds, and whatnot

Excellent. Good work, Ben: ah, the mighty service level agreement! the tooth and claw by which the wily customer brings the vendor to heel. get the SLA right and you, the customer, can sit back and relax, safe in the knowledge that should there be an outage, you are covered. your business is protected from...
Continue reading...

Annoying To Me.

I can’t tell you how ripped I get when people say things like this: “cloud computing means getting rid of ops” If by “ops” you mean “people in data centers racking servers, installing OSes, running cables, replacing broken hardware, etc.” then sure, cloud computing aims to relieve you of those burdens. If you really think...
Continue reading...