Surge — A Scalability & Performance Conference, presented by OmniTI.

Surge 2010 Conference Schedule

Discussing Scalability Matters…

…because scalability matters. Surge is more than an event, it's a chance to identify emerging trends and meet the architects behind established technologies. Learn from their mistakes and see how their victories can power your business forward.

Day 1 Thursday - September 30th

Time The Corinthian Room The Marble Room
8:00 am
Registration Continental Breakfast 8:30-10 in Roman Room
9:00 am Keynote - John Allspaw

Opening Keynote

Day 1 - 9:00 am

Location: Corinthian

  • Group Session
9:30 am Keynote - Bryan Cantrill

Opening Keynote

Day 1 - 9:30 am

Location: Corinthian

  • Group Session
10:00 am Watch Video Theo Schlossnagle

Scalable Design Patterns

Day 1 - 10:00 am

Location: Corinthian

  • Scalability,
  • Web Architectures

Building scalable architecture is not rocket science — it's computer science. The tome "Design Patterns" shows us two things: (1) that there are many applicable approaches to solving common programming problems and (2) people misapply them all the time...

Watch Video Paul Querna

Libcloud: a unified interface into the cloud

Day 1 - 10:00 am

Location: Marble

  • Cloud

What is possible when you can consume compute resources on various hosting providers with nothing more than a python script? This talk will discuss Apache Libcloud, an Apache Incubator project dedicated to building standard interfaces into cloud computing...
11:00 am Watch Video Justin Sheehy

Embracing Concurrency at Scale

Day 1 - 11:00 am

Location: Corinthian

  • Scalability

We're at Surge because we agree that scalability matters. However, words like "scaling" get thrown around sometimes without discussing the fundamental problems that come along with distributed systems. Some of these problems (such as the CAP theorem) are often referred to without understanding the context that makes them important....

 Watch Video Ronald Bradford

The most common MySQL scalability mistakes, and how to avoid them.

Day 1 - 11:00 am

Location: Marble

  • MySQL, Scalabilty

The most common mistakes are easy to avoid however many startups continue to fall prey, with the impact including large re-design costs, delays in new feature releases, lower staff productivity and less then ideal ROI. All growing and successful sites need to achieve higher Availability, seamless Scalability and proven Resilience...
12:00 pm Lunch
1:30 pm Watch Video Ruslan Belkin

Going 0 to 60: Scaling LinkedIn

Day 1 - 1:30 pm

Location: Corinthian

  • Scalability

Scaling LinkedIn to be the largest professional network in the world. Have you ever wondered what architectures the site like LinkedIn may have used and what insights teams have learned while growing the system from serving just a handful to close to a hundred million of users?...

 Watch Video Robert Treat

Database Scalability Patterns

Day 1 - 1:30 pm

Location: Marble

  • Scalability, DBA

We often have clients approach us looking for help in scaling their systems, and all too often their long term vision is a mixed reality based on the approaches read about on popular blogs trying to solve very different problems...
2:30 pm Watch Video Artur Bergman

Scaling and Loadbalancing Wikia Across The World

Day 1 - 2:30 pm

Location: Corinthian

  • Scalability

Wikia hosts around a 100 000 wikis using the open source Mediawiki software. In this talk I'll take a tour through the process of taking a legacy source code and turning it into a globally distributed system. Wikia runs across 6 datacenters in US and Europe...

 Tom Cook

A Day in the Life of Facebook Operations

Day 1 - 2:30 pm

Location: Marble

  • Web Operations

Facebook is now the #2 global website, responsible for billions of photos, conversations, and interactions between people all around the world running on top of tens of thousands of servers spread across multiple geographically-separated datacenters...

3:30 pm Break
4:00 pm Watch Video Rasmus Lerdorf

PHP Performance Checklist

Day 1 - 4:00 pm

Location: Corinthian

  • Web Performance,
  • Engineering

There has been a lot of interest in PHP performance lately, spurred by Facebook's HipHop PHP announcement in February. Most people don't know how fast their site is and will make uninformed architecture decisions or spend time optimizing the wrong things based mostly on myths and innuendo...

Watch Video Mike Malone

Working with Dimensional Data in a Distributed Hash Table

Day 1 - 4:00 pm

Location: Marble

  • Data Storage, Scalability

Recently a new class of database technologies has developed offering massively scalable distributed hash table functionality. Relative to more traditional relational database systems, these systems are simple to operate and capable of managing massive data sets...
5:00 pm Watch Video Surge Panel Discussion: "SQL vs NoSQL" w/ Geir Magnusson Jr (Moderator), Robert Treat, Baron Schwartz, Mike Malone and Justin Sheehy

SQL vs NoSQL

Day 1 - 5:00 pm

Location: Corinthian

noSQL isn't new, but it has a new fervor in the web community. There has been a relentless battle of fanatics (similar to the vi vs. emacs wars) arguing which is better. The interesting truth is that almost all large (and successful) web properties use both. This panel will not focus on which is better, but talk instead about how they are different and the specific uses for which they are better...
6:00 pm After-Hours Reception and Dyntini

Day 2 Friday - October 1st

Time The Corinthian Room The Marble Room
8:00 am
Registration Continental Breakfast 8:30-10 in Roman Room
9:00 am Bryan Cantrill

Enterprise solutions from commodity components: The Promise and the Peril

Day 2 - 9:00 am

Location: Corinthian

  • Reliability

The economics of commodity components are undeniable, but they also can suffer from acute reliability problems that introduce new (and often unanticipatable) failure modes. Even in a thoughtful architecture that is putatively designed around unreliable components, these failure modes can have dire consequences, potentially cascading into systemic failure...

 Watch Video Benjamin Black

Go with the flow - Meditations on network infrastructure analysis

Day 2 - 9:00 am

Location: Marble

  • Networks

Highly scaled distributed web applications are predicated on a functional network, yet organizations rarely have detailed information about the consumption and expense of network resources. This data is essential for effective denial of service detection, intrusion detection, troubleshooting, capacity planning, and traffic engineering...
10:00 am Watch Video Gavin M. Roy

Scaling myYearbook.com - Lessons Learned From Rapid Growth

Day 2 - 10:00 am

Location: Corinthian

  • Scalability

myYearbook.com is one of the top 25 most trafficked websites in the United States, experiencing large scale growth over a very short period of time. Employing technologies such as PHP, PostgreSQL, memcached as well as newer cutting edge technologies...

 Geir Magnusson Jr

Growth At Gilt Groupe : Staying on Track When Rails Fails

Day 2 - 11:00 am

Location: Marble

  • Scalability,
  • Rails

Gilt Groupe is the leading online "flash sale" retailer in the United States, providing invitation-only access to limited-time Men's, Women's and Children's coveted fashion and luxury brands at prices up to 70% off retail. Originally written in Ruby On Rails, the exceptionally successful "shock traffic" business model has led to countless scalability challenges as the business grew from a one-sale-a-day startup to the $500MM+ business it is today...
11:00 am Watch Video John Allspaw

The "Go or No-Go": Operability and Contingency at Etsy

Day 2 - 11:00 am

Location: Corinthian

  • Scalability,
  • Operations

You've been working on the wicked new feature for a long time. Design is done, the product people love it, and the code's about as polished as it can be. Launching new public-facing features is different than making small changes to existing functionality...

Watch Video Rod Cope

Top 10 Lessons Learned from Deploying Hadoop in a Private Cloud

Day 2 - 11:00 am

Location: Marble

  • Cloud,
  • NoSQL

Hadoop, HBase, and friends are built from the ground up to support Big Data/NoSQL, but that doesn't make them easy. Just like with any other relatively new and complex technologies, there are some rough edges and growing pains to manage...
12:00 pm Lunch
1:30 pm Watch Video Christopher Brown

Design for Scale - Patterns, Anti-Patterns, Successes and Failures

Day 2 - 1:30 pm

Location: Corinthian

  • Scalability

This isn't your "Gang of Four". Christopher will discuss his experiences building Amazon's EC2 and the Opscode Platform, and the experiences of others designing large-scale online services...

Watch Video Neil Gunther

Quantifying Scalability FTW

Day 2 - 1:30 pm

Location: Marble

  • Scalability

You probably already collect performance data, but data ain't information. Successful scalability requires transforming your data to quantify the cost-benefit of any architectural decisions...
2:30 pm Watch Video Tom Daly

Anycast Routing: Local Delivery

Day 2 - 2:30 pm

Location: Corinthian

  • Anycast, Networks

Anycast Routing is used on the Internet to provide many services, including NTP and DNS, but very few know that you can locally deliver websites and content over HTTP/TCP/Anycast. There's many factors that go into designing an anycasted network...

 Watch Video Cosimo Streppone

From disaster to stability: scaling challenges of my.opera.com

Day 2 - 2:30 pm

Location: Marble

  • Scalability

My Opera started around 2002 as a hacked version of phpBB. By 2007, it was slowly heading for disaster, with severely overloaded databases and backends. Our (back then) million of users were just as frustrated as us...
3:30 pm Break
4:00 pm Watch Video Baron Schwartz

Why Some Architects Almost Never Shard Their Applications

Day 2 - 4:00 pm

Location: Corinthian

  • Scalability

"Shard early, shard often" is common advice -- and it's often wrong. In reality, many systems don't have to be sharded. Sharding is a strategy that should be understood in its context: as one of the many legitimate choices...

 Watch Video Joe Williams

Availability, the Cloud and Everything

Day 2 - 4:00 pm

Location: Marble

  • Cloud,
  • NoSQL

The talk will focus on how I (with the help of the entire Cloudant team) built our database service based on CouchDB on top of EC2. Specifically how we use Erlang, Chef, EC2 and other tools to build highly available and performant database clusters...

5:00 pm Watch Video Plenary Keynote - Theo Schlossnagle

Plenary Keynote - A Scalability Call to Action

Day 2 - 5:00 pm

Location: Corinthian

  • Group Session

Program

Sessions

Additional speakers will be added as we approach the event dates. Visit back for updates to this page and the Speaker List.