Here are my notes from today’s geekSessions 2.2 in San Francisco:
Allan Leinwand, CTO Zynga
Allan gave a short talk on Zynga’s infrastructure, in particular Z Cloud, and Amazon EC2-compatible private cloud. Seems like another proof that AWS is the de-facto standard, at least for compute cloud and storage cloud solutions. If you want to build a hybrid cloud solution, better make sure that it integrates with EC2…
Big Switch
Next up was a tech guy from BigSwitch who promoted an open source network virtualization software, named OpenFlow.
Mike Christian, Business Continuity Planning Yahoo!
Mike reminded us that data centers sometimes go down. When you manage 45 of them, probability is high that one of them disconnects once a week or so, due to a multitude of potential failures: network instability, HVAC failures, UPS failures (apparently a big problem), generator failures – and more mundane issues, such as a leeky roof or a hungry squirrel.
The advice: focus on impact duration, not incident duration, i.e. being able to fail over traffic from one DC to another within minutes, use DNS-based Global Server Load Balancing, degrade service gracefully.
Gleb Budman, CEO Backblaze
Gleb showed how to build an Internet-connected backup server for $5/month. Backblaze targets consumers and small businesses, and does not enforce a storage space limit. Average users store a bit more than 50 GB. Backblaze certainly is cheaper than Amazon S3, on the other hand does not offer (geo-)replication but only RAID redundancy and other nice things like a Web service API, et cetera. Well, you get what you pay for. Not everybody needs a cloud.
Cliff Moon, Co-Founder Boundary
Cliff gave a very entertaining talk, complaining about old-fashioned (client, app, OS, and network) monitoring tools and evangelized the next generation of monitoring tools, like OpenTSDB, and – you guessed it – Boundary.
