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Awesome Velocity

As I am sipping on my café americano in the Starbucks near the Friedrichstrasse railway station in Berlin, waiting for my travel back home, I look back on 3 days of Velocity Europe. Velocity is where developers and managers of large websites meet. We are talking seriously large websites here.

The word most appropriate to the Velocity conference is “awesome”. It is not only appropriate for the conference; it is also used a lot in announcements, it describes a lot of the technology, the talks, and the general scale of the stuff that is being built.

These are the people who build the cloud.

These are the people who are honest about the mistakes and epic failures that you can make when you run more than a few thousand servers. One story was from an old hand at YouTube, who had seen it grow from three servers to the world’s largest collection of cat videos and dogs on skateboards (as he put it). He has seen multiple tsunamis of users pushing his infrastructure to the limit.

Personally, I went to Velocity to see how systems development and management operates at this scale, so I can explain that to the people who are working in more mundane IT shops. I will write about that more later; a lot of it is about applying agile development processes to operations, as well as teaching software engineers about operations. When your goal is to shave 200 milliseconds off the end-user delay, everybody needs to understand the end-to-end picture. You cannot ‘silo’ this off.

So, make sure you come back to this blog, or for more information to come on how cloud computing will transform IT management.

Finally, http://stevesouders.com/velocity/videosveu2011.php has a list of the video’s that were shown during the breaks, I like ‘hydro remote’ the best, it is hilarious.

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