Infrastructure at Scale

Trends in Architecture and Design
24 April 11:10am - 12:00pm @ Ballroom A

Many operations teams are tasked with competing goals of quickly delivering reliable infrastructure and also ensuring high uptime for all infrastructure components. By the time an organization has more than 50,000 hosts, this process is very well defined, usually the result of some very expensive mistakes made along the way. The purpose of this talk is to share best practices and lessons learned as we have scaled many organizations from tens to thousands of servers. We'll ask, and answer, questions like:

- How & what should we automate?
- What metrics matter?
- When does change control process become important?

We'll also talk about the rule of threes, why user ids are important, why time matters, and many other details that are often overlooked at the early phases of scaling.

Speakers

Ryan Lowe
Percona
Biography: 
Ryan worked for a variety of companies, including several startups, and he has a background in many different database technologies. He has extensive experience as a developer, DBA, manager, and consultant. In addition, he has worked in a broad range of industries across the globe, including health care, telecommunications, social networking, and defense. His specialties include full-stack performance optimization, scaling, and high availability.
Fernando Ipar
Consultant, Percona
Biography: 
Fernando works as Senior Consultant at Percona. Prior to joining the company, he worked as a contractor for several financial services institutions, telcos, and smaller technology providers. During that period, he acquired experience managing different UNIX type systems, developing or improving fault tolerant software, and managing small teams of technically skilled people. He lives with his family in Montevideo, Uruguay. When not working, he enjoys family life, music and coffee.
Marcos Albe
Support Engineer, Percona
Biography: 
Marcos Albe has been doing web development for over ten years, providing solutions for various media and technology companies of different sizes. He is now a member of the Percona Support Team. Born and raised in the city of Montevideo, Uruguay, he became passionate about computers at the age of 11, when he got a 25Mhz i386-SX. Some ten years later, he became one of the pioneers in telecommuting in Uruguay while leading the IT efforts for the second largest newspaper in the country. Marcos also has a passion for teaching. As the first Zend Certified Engineer in Uruguay, he provided PHP training for several companies, and he also gave free workshops to public college students. His motto is: Teaching is the best way to learn. At the age of 32, he became a father and husband, which has made him truly happy. He is planning to move to a more quiet town to raise his toddler.
Dave Apgar
Production Engineer, Square
Biography: 
Dave Apgar works for Square as a Production Engineer, focusing on system automation, monitoring, and obviously databases. Prior to Square he worked at Yahoo! as High Availability Architect and lead developer on Yahoo!'s global server load balancing platform.

Slides