Category Archives: Cloud computing

[Video 447] Prasad Jonnalagadda: Content Delivery at Massive Scale using Control Plane Servers at Netflix

If you have a popular Web site, then you’ll realize (sooner or later) that the static content can and should be offloaded to a third-party service, known as a “content delivery network” (CDN), that specializes in getting content to users as quickly (and locally) as possible. Netflix also used CDNs for some time — but over the years, they have moved away from using third-party CDNs, and in favor of using their own, highly scaled, solution. Why and how did they make this change? How did this affect Netflix and its users? In this talk, Prasad Jonnalagadda describes the architecture that Netflix adopted, and the implications that this has had on the company and their technical teams.

Time: 1 hour

[Video 431] Mandy Waite: Ok, so I have all these Containers, what now?

Containers are a big thing in IT and devops — the idea that you can have lightweight virtual machines that can be launched, duplicated, copied, and scaled up is very attractive, and for good reason. But what happens when you have a very large number of containers?  Have you simply exchanged one problem for another? Or are there methods and systems you can use to manage your containers? In this talk, Mandy Waite describes what she and others at Google are doing to make it easier to work with containers, and how you should start to look at containers if you’re to use them most effectively.

[Video 384] Kenny Gorman: Cloud PostgreSQL Automation Management with Ansible

Many applications now use PostgreSQL as a database; the price, features, and community have long made for a compelling use case. But what if you need several, or many, PostgreSQL servers? How can you best deploy such servers? One answer is to use Ansible, a provisioning system written in Python that has become an increasingly popular alternative to such well-known systems as Chef and Puppet.  In this talk, Kenny Gorman describes why you would want to provision your PostgreSQL servers with Ansible, and then how you can do so.

[Video 368] Aja Hammerly: Stupid Ideas For Many Computers

What can you do with lots of computers? Cloud computing allows us to scale up (and down) very quickly, but how do we do that?  And what do we do with such scale when we can? Well, worry no longer, because Aja Hammerly has come up with many ideas for what you can do with large numbers of computers. Between playing games, solving problems, and building huge regular expressions, this talk is fun and interesting, and shows what you can do with some Ruby, lots of computers, and a playful imagination.

[Video 251] Josh Berkus: Shootout at the PAAS Corral

Is it a good idea to put PostgreSQL in the cloud? If so, then which cloud (“Platform as a service” — “PaaS”) provider provides the best performance? And which options should you use, once you have settled on a vendor?  These are questions that I’m increasingly asked by my clients, and I was thus particularly happy to have discovered this talk, in which  Josh Berkus describes his investigation and comparison of various PostgreSQL cloud providers. If you’re wondering whether the cloud is an appropriate location for your database, but weren’t sure which provider might make the most sense, this talk should be quite interesting for you.