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I wrote a post back in July 2012 on Urs Hoelzle’s presentation on OpenFlow at Google. I pieced together the presentation from snippets around the web.
People still look for the Google presentation, so I figured it is a good thing to send an update out.
here is the original slide deck which is much better.
Here is the Youtube video of the talk that you can look at the slides.
I stopped going to Uptime Symposium three years ago, when I was no longer able to attend the conference as media. My blog doesn’t qualify as full time industry publication. Explained another way, my blog doesn’t play by the rules influenced by the industry vendors and analysts. If I had any ad sponsorship money from the data center industry then it is hard to say it wouldn’t influence what I write. I do get influenced by my friends and what they think. :-)
Missing the conference means I don’t see friends, but I find I can go to other conferences like 7x24 Exchange and see most of the people I want to connect.
When I took a look at the latest schedule for the 2014 Symposium it reminded me of a Gartner Data Center conference where most of the presenters are Gartner analysts with a sprinkling of industry people. This next Uptime has 451 group as the speakers which is great for those who subscribe to 451 Group’s services.
I remember going to my first Uptime Symposium with Mike Manos and Christian Belady. I learned a lot and made good friends. One of the more memorable is an ex-Google data center engineer who I was able to have insightful discussions on the state of the data center industry and still keep in touch with.
Industry events are great places to meet people. Next week I am off to wireless/mobile conference in Vancouver.
Here is the event.
The session I am speaking on is this one.
What’s Real at the Nexus of Forces: Mobile, social, data, cloud?
This time, change is coming from four directions. Post-web computing harnesses disruptive technologies in the cloud and on mobile devices, and puts social media and big data to work. While consumer-driven tech leaks into the enterprise, line of business management and IT must collaborate to get the most of these four critical technologies. But hold off the hype, and keep the futurists focused: this session will zero in on what’s realistic in the next 12-24 months. What’s pie-in-the-sky and what’s driving 12-24 month decisions that can show payoff?
I am off to the fifth Open Compute Summit.
OCP Summit V
Wednesday, January 08, 2014 · Posted by at 12:00 PM
We are pleased to announce the dates for the next Open Compute Project Summit on Tuesday, January 28 and Wednesday, January 29, 2014 at the newly expanded San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, CA.
At the last summit, attendees came from the technology sector in addition to finance, government, and consulting. These attendees represented executive-level roles of vice president or higher as well as IT directors and managers.
The Open Compute Project Foundation would like to thank these sponsors for making this event possible!
Venue
San Jose Convention Center - 150 West San Carlos Street, San Jose, CA 95113
The growth of Open Compute I think has surprised most every one, going from space on Page Mill Road in their office building to venues in NYC, Rack Space in San Antonio, Santa Clara Convention Center and now San Jose Convention center.
Don’t know what my rate of blogging will be. There are plenty of media folks that will be there to cover the event. I’ll probably focus on networking and catching up with old friends, then blog later.
There is tons of press on Gmail outage. I was on the phone during the time the outage occurred so gmail being down didn’t bother me, but it did bother many others.
Gmail goes down briefly and everybody flips out
Atlanta Journal Constitution - 5 hours agoIf you're watching this, congratulations! You've survived the Great Google Outage of Jan. 24, 2014. At about 2:15 p.m. eastern time Friday, Gmail users across the world began seeing Temporary Error (500) error message while trying to access their email ...Google's Gmail outage leaves many in the dark [San Jose Mercury News :: ]
Businessweek - 14 hours agoJan. 24--MOUNTAIN VIEW -- An unexplained outage affected countless users of Google's (GOOG) popular Gmail service for more than an hour Friday, while also disrupting the Google Plus social network and some of the company's other Web services, ...Google's reliability team was prepping for a reddit AMA when Gmail went down
Washington Post (blog) - 50 minutes agoWhile most of Twitter panicked over (and Yahoo celebrated) a Gmail outage, Google's Site Reliability Engineering was preparing to do an "Ask Me Anything" reddit thread. Depending on how paranoid you are, that may seem either incredibly ironic or like ...Google services go down as Reliability team takes questions on Reddit
Fox News - 10 hours agoMany of Google's services hiccupped briefly on Friday, as an unexplained outage knocked offline such popular services as Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Docs, Drive and more. As of 3:23 p.m. EST, the service was back up and running smoothly, according to the ...Here's what caused that massive Gmail outage
Washington Post (blog) - 50 minutes agoThe outage, Traynor continued, essentially fixed itself when the system responsible for the malfunction automatically generated the correct configuration and began propagating that throughout Google's live services. Google offered an apology for the mishap ...
Here is Blog Post from Google VP Engineering Ben Traynor. The brief summary of the problem, and how it self repaired is here.
At 10:55 a.m. PST this morning, an internal system that generates configurations—essentially, information that tells other systems how to behave—encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration. The incorrect configuration was sent to live services over the next 15 minutes, caused users’ requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors. Users began seeing these errors on affected services at 11:02 a.m., and at that time our internal monitoring alerted Google’s Site Reliability Team. Engineers were still debugging 12 minutes later when the same system, having automatically cleared the original error, generated a new correct configuration at 11:14 a.m. and began sending it; errors subsided rapidly starting at this time. By 11:30 a.m. the correct configuration was live everywhere and almost all users’ service was restored.
Naive users are comparing Yahoo’s email outage to Google’s gmail. Did Yahoo self heal? No.
Google knows it can win the e-mail battle with better availability. Things happen, but if you can quickly recover and find the cause the overall site reliability should improve.
With services once again working normally, our work is now focused on (a) removing the source of failure that caused today’s outage, and (b) speeding up recovery when a problem does occur. We'll be taking the following steps in the next few days:
1. Correcting the bug in the configuration generator to prevent recurrence, and auditing all other critical configuration generation systems to ensure they do not contain a similar bug.
2. Adding additional input validation checks for configurations, so that a bad configuration generated in the future will not result in service disruption.
3. Adding additional targeted monitoring to more quickly detect and diagnose the cause of service failure.
Sometimes the best response to a silly idea is to make fun of it in response. Facebook posts its response to Princeton’s paper that Facebook will have 80% users.
Debunking Princeton
January 23, 2014 at 2:57pmLike many of you, we were intrigued by a recent article by Princeton researchers predicting the imminent demise of Facebook. Of particular interest was the innovative use of Google search data to predict engagement trends, instead of studying the actual engagement trends. Using the same robust methodology featured in the paper, we attempted to find out more about this "Princeton University" - and you won't believe what we found!
Facebook pokes fun that simply because there is a correlation graph it can explained by causation.
In keeping with the scientific principle "correlation equals causation," our research unequivocally demonstrated that Princeton may be in danger of disappearing entirely. Looking at page likes on Facebook, we find the following alarming trend:
To bring up data outside Facebook, Google Trends is used.
Sadly, this spells bad news for this Princeton entity, whose Google Trends search scores have been declining for the last several years:
This trend suggests that Princeton will have only half its current enrollment by 2018, and by 2021 it will have no students at all, agreeing with the previous graph of scholarly scholarliness. Based on our robust scientific analysis, future generations will only be able to imagine this now-rubble institution that once walked this earth.
