Two new open source projects at Velocity

At Velocity next week there will be two significant open source projects debuting. The first is the Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation tool created by Scott Ruthfield and his team at Whitepages.com.

Most tools for measuring web performance come in two flavors:

• Developer-installed tools (Firebug, Fiddler, etc.) that allow individuals to closely trace single sessions


• Third-party performance monitoring systems (Gomez, Keynote, etc.) that will hit your site occasionally and report back component-level metrics (for a fee)

Neither of these tools give you real-world information on what’s actually happening with your clients—how long are pages really taking to load, what’s the real cost of client-side execution, and what’s the impact of your loading or dependency chain. This is even more important when you don’t host all of your own assets, such as when you load ads or JavaScript from third parties, for example, and you need to monitor their performance.

Thus we built Jiffy—an end-to-end system for instrumenting your web pages, capturing client-side timings for any event that you determine, and storing and reporting on those timings. You run Jiffy yourself, so you aren’t dependent on the performance characteristics, inflexibility, or costs of third-party hosted services.

The second is project is EUCALYPTUS, the Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems, presented by Rich Wolski from UCSB. This project has already started getting attention. (Many thanks to Surj Patel of Structure08/GigaOM for connecting us!)

Eucalyptus is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing "cloud computing" on clusters. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly-available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain.

The talk will focus on the design, the implementation tradeoffs we have identified in implementing Eucalyptus as an exploratory tool, and the ways in which we have chosen to address these tradeoffs in the first version of the software.

Structure and Velocity

Several people have asked me about the differences between Om Malik's Structure conference and our Velocity Web Performance & Operations conference.  Velocity is on June 23 & 24th at the SFO Mariott, and Structure follows on June 25th in San Francisco. 

The conferences are complementary: Structure discusses what is changing in internet infrastructure, and Velocity teaches how to make that change happen.

I've been recommending that anyone considering Structure make sure their engineering teams are going to Velocity.  For many technical leaders I think there is value in attending both, and I definitely plan on doing so.

The knowledge and skills learned at Velocity can be put to immediate use and will have significant impact on your business.  The reason for this is simple:

Faster, scalable, and highly available websites serve more pages to more customers in the same amount of time.

That's why we've worked hard to make Velocity the best resource for engineers to learn how to build and operate at web scale.  Here are a few examples:

Adam Jacob will give a step-by-step overview of Building an Automated Infrastructure, and then Luke Kanies will follow up with an in-depth session on Puppet.  This is the exact combination I used to explain how effective operations is a huge competitive advantage:

Luiz Barroso will describe Google's approach to energy-efficient datacenter design and management.  Applying these lessons can ultimately save millions of dollars, increase your operational agility, and decrease your environmental footprint.

Mandi Walls will teach how actionable logging can mean the difference between a 20-minute outage and a 2-hour outage while esoteric error codes are deciphered or developers are contacted to investigate.

Eric Lawrence, Program Manager for Internet Explorer, and Mike Connor, lead developer for Mozilla Firefox will explain how to optimize page performance for their respective browsers.  We'll also have demos of leading performance testing tools: HTTPwatch, Fiddler, AOL PageTest, and Firebug.

John Allspaw from Flickr will be be giving a talk about Capacity Management.  John's way of explaining both the problem and the opportunity is wonderfully straightforward:

You can check out the rest of the program and register on the Velocity site.  (Hint: You can use the code "vel08js" for a 20% discount.)  I'll be posting frequently as we add speakers and events.  I hope to see you at Velocity!