Upcoming at OSCON 2012 in Portland, OR
This talk offers a deep-dive into how application-level problems manifest at the network level. Some of these cases range from basic network partitions and node outages to sophisticated application-level changes such as garbage collection-induced pauses, classes of bugs which evade conventional monitoring but constitute partial failures, changes in network activity based on database partitioning, load balancing, and sharding, and other warning signs that crop up at layer three long before wreaking havoc at layer seven as customer-visible failures begin to occur. Combining application-level metrics with network analytics is a powerful cocktail for identifying hot spots quickly, and connecting the dots out to the client closes the whole loop.
Proposed - TBA
Faced with unprecedented growth and equally demanding calls for reliability and predictability, we as engineers find ourselves called to develop stable distributed applications with solid scalability characteristics and seamless failure modes – and to get them into production by yesterday. While some applications can be designed as stateless, shared-nothing systems, others (such as databases, caches, stream processing engines, and other stateful systems) require predictable computation and a more complex distribution story. This talk provides an overview of popular distributed application design strategies (Dynamo, master / slave, and centrally-coordinated but self-organizing systems), load balancing techniques, warm handoff and rebalancing, and clean handling of failures.
November 17, 2011
This talk from a Boundary Pizza, Beer, & Tech Talks meetup includes a walkthrough of Boundary's stream processing infrastructure and garbage collection strategies for pushing the bounds of JVM throughput.
OSCON 2011
A language-agnostic discussion focusing instead upon concepts and strategies applicable to many programming languages with specific examples in static languages like Java/Scala, conventional dynamic languages such as Python/Ruby, and emerging platforms such as Node.js.