Jacob Rosenberg’s Blog

A whole lot of conferences are happening this week, and I’ll be attending two of them. On Monday and Tuesday of this week I’ll be attending O’Reilly’s Velocity conference, where I’ll be moderating a panel entitled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about CDNs (but were afraid to ask).” I’m hoping that seems to be fun, but there ought to be a lot of other interesting people I’d like to see while there as well, including two other very smart folks from AOL (Mandi Walls and Eric Goldsmith). I’ve been thinking about this as “Web 2.0 Expo without all that boring UI and Business Stuff”. 

The second event I’ll be at will be GigaOM’s Structure 08. Cloud computing is really leveling the playing field, giving small start-ups access to world-class operational assets… which to me only underscore the importance of having brilliant Ops folks to run those systems. I’m eager to see what sort of discussions emerge.

If you happen to be at either, give me a buzz in the comments, and I’ll try and catch up with you. 

A surprisingly high number of the people I know who work in Technology Operations roles around the industry have parents who think they fix broken Outlook installations for a living. This is a not a reflection on their parents, per se, but rather it represents the challenge of distinguishing an Operations role from an IT role. Most people who work in any modern organization have interactions with IT staff, making the identification quite easy (Oh, that’s what little Johnny does). The problem with this identification is that it is probably wrong.

DISCLAIMER: This is also not a negative reflection on IT staff. Certainly, there a distinction between the roles, but I mean absolutely no disrespect of any kind to the helpful and hardworking people who keep computing systems running everywhere.
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Successful web products don’t just grow, they grow explosively. If people love something about them, they’ll tell everyone they know about them, and they tell their friends, and before you know it, a product in stealth mode is getting used everywhere from Akron, Ohio to Harare, Zimbabwe. It’s around this time that just being on a couple of servers in a rack somewhere isn’t enough. It’s time for the next Big Step in the evolution of a web site’s scale. Today, I’m covering the “why” of Big Step 2, going multi-site. (more…)

As products get successful, they grow. For client applications that run on someone’s computer, this doesn’t necessarily represent a huge challenge: just make more CDs. For network applications in general, and web products in specific, this presents a different challenge. There are two distinct points in the growth of a web application which represent step functions in the level of complexity. I call these points the Big Steps. Today, I’ll cover Big Step 1, going multi-server.
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