JacobRosenberg.net

Just the other day, I stumbled on Yet Another Startup CDN Provider, SimpleCDN. The CDN business has become very crowded as facilities-based carriers (AT&T and Level), start-ups (Limelight, Peer1, Panther Express), and the established leader (Akamai) engaged in a free-for-all over price. SimpleCDN’s value proposition is straightforward: pay a one-time up-front fee based on object size, instead of monthly based on usage. The big question I’m inclined to want answered is: how could this possibly work as a business?

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve mentioned in the past that the failure of complex systems is an inevitable fact of nature. The corresponding act of human inquisition into the reasons for that failure are equally inevitable. Where I work — and almost every other large installation I’ve seen or been part of — the learnings from these inquisitions are shared for educational reasons. The name for this differs from company to company: some call it a RFO (reason for outage) or an After-Action Report, but for whatever reasons the name for this at AOL is a Post-Mortem.

Read the rest of this entry »

A whole lot of conferences are happening this week, and I’ll be attending two of them. On Monday and Tuesday of this week I’ll be attending O’Reilly’s Velocity conference, where I’ll be moderating a panel entitled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about CDNs (but were afraid to ask).” I’m hoping that seems to be fun, but there ought to be a lot of other interesting people I’d like to see while there as well, including two other very smart folks from AOL (Mandi Walls and Eric Goldsmith). I’ve been thinking about this as “Web 2.0 Expo without all that boring UI and Business Stuff”. 

The second event I’ll be at will be GigaOM’s Structure 08. Cloud computing is really leveling the playing field, giving small start-ups access to world-class operational assets… which to me only underscore the importance of having brilliant Ops folks to run those systems. I’m eager to see what sort of discussions emerge.

If you happen to be at either, give me a buzz in the comments, and I’ll try and catch up with you. 

This past Friday, DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) raised $640 million in an IPO. DFT is a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) which specializes in large-scale commercial data centers. More to the point, they specialize in the sort of facilities which are desired by the largest technology companies. I’ve mentioned before that building and operating facilities is often desirable for larger players, but when it isn’t, they increasingly turn to DFT.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been well-reported that AOL made cuts today. While I wasn’t among those affected, naturally with any event this large, quite a few people I knew and worked with were amongst those impacted. Read the rest of this entry »

The relentless pursuit by Operations staff of 100% uptime has always struck me as something more than just a job, but a battle against the relentless forces of nature. Everything ultimately breaks down — systems, buildings, even people — and attempting to maintain 100% availability is the Ops equivalent of trying to cheat death. Sooner or later, despite our best efforts, our number will ultimately be up. Most recently in the news, self-proclaimed World’s Finest Data Center operator 365 Main suffered an approximately 45 minute power outage at their San Francisco facility. Much to their credit., and unlike most of their competitors, 365 Main has been extremely open about their investigation. I’ll examine this a bit today, as it’s a rare public glimpse into what goes on inside a large data center facility.
Read the rest of this entry »

As promised, the presentation from Geographic Distribution for Global Web Application Performance. This was presented today at Web 2.0 Expo.

I’m pleased to announce that on Tuesday, April 17th, I’ll be presenting a brief discussion of Geographic Distribution at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. As the web matures, performance has become a tremendous issue, especially when deploying an application for a global audience. One important way to improve performance is the geographic distribution of application delivery. Join me at 8:30am tomorrow in 2018, or check out my slides, which will be posted shortly after the discussion.

While most of my time these days is spent contemplating software and application considerations, I’d like to take a moment to address a topic which only occasionally gets the attention it deserves: the role of a high quality data center. While a few folks may think that networking and data center infrastructure are dead arts, I’m quite confident that there is still significant work going on in this space. Case in point: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Google, and (shockingly) Google are building massive new data centers taking advantage of all of the latest features to increase density and automation and reduce cost. At the end of the day, scale wins, and these facilities (which have price tags in the half-a-billion dollar range) have scale. Not to be outdone, incidentally, AOL has built a few big data centers — and sold them too. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the more interesting questions in technology is how to know when it’s time for it to change. David Habib writes today about a concept he calls Technology Vendor Stockholm Syndrome, which occurs when technologists have worked so long with a vendor that they develop what he calls an unhealthy partnership with them. I’d argue it goes even deeper: there’s such a thing as a Technology Stockholm Syndrome that can develop around any sort of technology, even in the absence of vendor advocates.

Read the rest of this entry »