From Grumpy's Garage

Image credit: Google Gemini Failure Is Not an Option; It’s Required To be presented at the Cascadia IT Conference , Seattle, WA, March 7-8, 2014  (55 minutes) Abstract Google SREs (system reliability engineers) spend almost 90% of their time handling or anticipating failure 1 . Managing failure is at the core of keeping Google services as reliable as they are. In this workshop, we will explore some of the principles Google employs to make services reliable and how you might use them in your work. Everything fails. With a little planning, you can fail well. Shorter Summary A workshop to explore some ways that Google SRE makes Google as reliable as it is, and how you can make your services more reliable, too, with a focus on failing well. More About Me Brian Haney has been a system administrator and SRE systems engineer for seven years. When not writing, speaking or teaching, he helps maintain some of Google’s internal storage infrastructure. Notes: 1: I posit this without comprehens...

"The Cloud" is an overloaded term. In tech-speak, "overloaded" means that people use the same term to mean different things. Computer geeks like to connect computers to each other and make them talk to each other in electronic ones and zeros, making a computer "network".  Some computers on the network might have special jobs, like listening for incoming email messages or accepting requests to download any new messages. A file server is a place to copy files to or from.  A web server is just a file server that listens for requests, usually from anywhere and in a certain protocol. Those files are in a particular format, like hypertext markup language (HTML), and often have references to other files also on the web server, like images and videos. You might have special devices on your network, like security cameras, web TVs, or wi-fi access radios. Somewhere, your network has a box that is also connected to the Internet, your Internet "router". A ro...

Last week I started listening to the audio book, Guerilla Marketing for the Home-Based Business . At the gym, I got as far as the chapter Direct Mail. I hate junk mail. I expected that chapter to be completely worthless. I was wrong. I Guerilla Marketer doesn't use direct mail to mean mass mailings. The Guerilla Marketer can fine tune their target mailing list to zoom in on key prospects. What's more, since you're not mailing to millions "OCCUPANTs", you can invest more in your message and presentation and even go so far as to make each direct mail piece a little more customized than just the mailing label and salutation. I found myself brainstorming about what value-added content I could fit onto an 8-1/2" x 11" three-panel brochure. A cheat sheet of the most important WordPress command? Wait. No, that won't work. WordPress doesn't have a command line. A checklist that every webmaster should go through every week? That sounds reasonable. Those p...

I've started reading Lean Analytics , and I feel like I've had an epiphany. It's not a miraculous vision of the future, but it feels like a light bulb just went on in my head. Running a startup is a lot like leading an expedition. You know pretty much where you started, and you kinda know where you want to be. (You might not be able to pin it on a map, but you'll know it when you see it.) And sometimes your destination moves while you are on your way. You need to survey the landscape, identify a likely route, follow that route, and monitor your progress. Sometimes you'll realize that your not quite on the right track, so you'll need execute a course correction, a pivot. You might need to plot a path around The Abyss of Over-Planning and tread lightly through Feature Bloat Tar Sands, but you can't get to your destination without starting, and you're better off knowing your relative progress from where you started, even if you're not sure of the distan...

I'm getting frazzled. Yesterday I got invited to join some other Seattle Lean Startup fans next Monday in a book reading group (see my recent post about Lean Analytics ). Cool. I accepted. Then I got invited to Kirkland for a reprise of the Google Developer Group talk about Autoscaler on the same night. Well, I heard half of the first one in Seattle last month. I'll pass. Then I got invited to Redmond for a WordPress discussion on that night about how to focus your blog . But Redmond is so out of my way. Can we do it again in Seattle? (Working on that. Stay tuned.) Wow! Monday is popular! But I'll stick with the Lean Analytics book group. But then, before I could break out my copy of Lean Analytics and start preparing for that meeting, I got invited to a discussion tomorrow night by the Seattle Area System Administrators Guild (SASAG ) about the OpenStack Swift storage system and how to deploy it. I recently got the OpenStack Swift book, and it *was* further down my rea...