Tag Archives: speaking

devops, presentation , , 2 Comments

Monitorama 2014 wrapup

I’m just settling back into the daily routine after RelEng/RelOps’ workweek and then Monitorama back-to-back.

Videos will eventually be posted here.

I thought it was awesome the conference started with some #hugops.

Here are my highlights:

  • I gave a talk about crontabber! I have my speakers notes if you’re interested!

  • Dan Slimmons gave a nice talk about basic probability and how understanding the difference between sensitivity and specificity can help you choose more useful alerts. It was super basic stats stuff, but a good foundation for building up stats competency in teams.

  • James Mickens gave a hilarious talk about the cloud that is well-worth finding when it goes up.

  • Ashe Dryden gave a talk about gender issues and “our most wicked problem”. It was very well-received by the audience, which was gratifying for me personally. I think the audience walked away with some very practical things to do: speak up among peers when someone says things that make you uncomfortable and ask questions about equal treatment in your company for things like salary, perks and benefits.

  • Several talks were given about monitoring and managing ops inside companies. My favorite was from Daniel Schauenberg (contributor to statsd) of Etsy. and Scott Sanders spoke about similar topics in this presentaton on Github’s outage lifecycle. And related, but not at the conference, Heroku just published an incident response runbook.

  • There was a hilarious lightning talk about the failure of the Swedish ship Vasa as an object lesson for massive project failure. Here’s a link to the case study the lightning talk was based on.

  • Larry Price (@laprice) gave a 5-minute talk about Postgres autovacuum tuning, which was awesome, and I hope he posts the slides. It reminded me that I should do a couple brownbags about Postgres config this summer!

  • I was struck by how many people said they used Postgres in production. Someone else asked the question during a talk, and nearly half the audience raised their hands.

  • InfluxDB, a new timeseries database emphasizing an HTTP API (remind anyone of CouchDB? :D), seemed interesting, although maybe rough around the edges when it came to documenting useful features/best practices. When I mentioned it on Twitter, I found a few folks already trying to use it in production and got at least one bug filed. 🙂

  • I also saw an amazing demo of Kibana, which seems like a very interesting dashboard/investigation/querying interface to Elastic Search. I watched a friend deploy it in about an hour to look at their ES systems last Wednesday.

  • Dashing from Shopify was also very interesting, although a rubyist project, so not easy to integrate with our Pythonic world. However, putting on a contributor relations hat — it could be a wonderful and beautiful way for contributors to interact with our many APIs.

I’m looking forward to the videos coming out and a list of slide decks, as I missed a few talks during hallway track conversations. I met several people who are managing similar or larger event loads than we do with Socorro, so it was fun swapping stories and seeing how their software stacks are evolving. RabbitMQ was a weapon of choice for reporting environments, along with Storm. Lots of love for Kafka was out there for the people dealing with real-time customer response.

Overall, highly recommend attending Monitorama to dip a toe into the state of the art with regard to system operations, monitoring and ops management.

pgcon, postgres, postgresql , , , , , 2 Comments

Looking toward Chicago: Postgres Open, local user groups, parties and on to October!

I’ve been incredibly busy this past month, and not blogging – being a free agent has possibly made me busier than I was before!

Postgres Open’s schedule is in near-final state. We’ve started adding talks to our Demo room on Thursday, and are looking forward to a keynote from Charles Fan, SVP at VMWare about recent developments in vmware’s cloud offerings for Postgres.

We’ll also be getting a more in-depth look at Heroku’s new postgres.heroku.com on-demand database service, as well as an open source tool they wrote called WAL-E.

Thanks to Heroku, we’ll be streaming much of the content from the conference live, so you’ll be able to catch the keynotes and many of the talks, even if you’re not there. And we’ll be sharing the videos after.

I believe we’re the first Postgres conference to do this! Someone correct me if I’m wrong. 🙂

While I’m in Chicago, I’m planning to drop by the Windy City Perl Mongers for a reprise of my 9.1 talk from OSCON.

We’re also planning a couple parties for Postgres Open, and hopefully inviting a few of the local user groups to join us.

After that, I’m headed in October to PostgreSQL Conference EU, and will be giving a talk about terabyte Postgres databases (and the problems you run into with them), and a database-specific “Mistakes were Made” talk, about operations and the tools we need to use to help us make fewer mistakes.