Resources

Here is my collection of links to other blogs, videos, articles and presentations that I’ve found useful in my research and general learning.

Videos

Mike Christian, Yahoo, on disaster recovery and business continuity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO2z3ttlpi4&list=PL80D9129677893FD8

Jay Parikh, Facebook, on building out infrastructure for a billion users: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oodS71YtkGU&list=PL80D9129677893FD8

Arvind Jain & Dominic Hamon, Google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnMI-dCWgec&list=PL80D9129677893FD8

Richard Cook, University of Chicago, on how the normal world is NOT well behaved, and that “systems as imagined” never actually resemble “systems as found:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S0k12uZR14&list=PL80D9129677893FD8&index=2

Jesse Robbins, OpsCode (makers of Chef), on aligning around business objectives, not uptime objectives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ7b97hPtuY&feature=player_embedded

John Allspaw, Etsy, on DevOps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f49pCUT1XAU

Elisabeth Hendrickson, Quality Tree, a test perspective on continuous deployment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghZAqphDbEA

Articles

Cormac Foster – “To be true SaaS, a company needs to design the application from the ground up to support parallel development of multiple projects, invest millions in scalable and secure infrastructure, and have services that go beyond fixing what’s broken. When you install a traditional application in the cloud, you still have all of the big, expensive headaches and poor outcomes.” In this view, “cloudified” solutions are just in-house software plus a hosting plan.” http://readwrite.com/2012/12/12/saas-enterprise-software-vendors-are-still-denying-reality

Joel York – Good side-by-side comparison of enterprise software models versus SaaS. http://chaotic-flow.com/contrasting-software-as-a-service-and-enterprise-software-business-models-2/

This one from Salesforce.com re-iterates many things we already know, but Mistake #10 caught my eye, as it says to concentrate on open APIs first. We can’t lose sight of this facet of accelerated development. Work on the APIs first, and consume them ourselves for enhancing capability. Smatter is an example of such thinking. http://www.salesforce.com/assets/pdf/misc/BPWP_10Mistakes_0408.pdf

Facebook approach to testing – they now use WebDriver to do this (they used to have Watir). But capturing all types of tests with automation is key.

• http://allfacebook.com/how-facebook-automatically-tests-code-phpunit-watir_b15369
• www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/watir-to-webdriver-unit-test-frameworks/10150314152278920
• http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/exclusive-a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-facebook-release-engineering/

A old document capturing how EBay build their solution. but still there are some very interesting point to take note.
http://www.addsimplicity.com/downloads/eBaySDForum2006-11-29.pdf

Several resources on Zero-downtown DB Upgrades:

• http://www.facebook.com/notes/mysql-at-facebook/online-schema-change-for-mysql/430801045932
• http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3174-taking-the-pain-out-of-mysql-schema-changes
• You can also read up on Pt-online-schema-change tools (google it) to lean about Percona Toolkit on MySql server. Another open source toolkit   http://code.google.com/p/openarkkit/  to allow online schema changes.  I believe db2 has the basics of these toolkits starting in 9.7 for some online modifications.
• http://scn.sap.com/thread/1387899
• http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/b0bcdae4-a5f0-2d10-ae89-b5512d4aa999?quicklink=index&overridelayout=true

Presentations

Mike Brittain, Etsy, Continuous Delivery – The Dirty Details: http://www.slideshare.net/mikebrittain/continuous-delivery-the-dirty-details

Ashish Kumar, Google, Development at the Speed and Scale of Google: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Development-at-Google