Ran across this error message on Flickr, when I was trying to get to my photostream
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Help a brother out..
Amit Gupta, a fellow geek and photographer, has been diagnosed with Acute Lukemia.. He needs a matching bone marrow to survive the odds. How can you help? Two (well three) simple steps
- Go visit http://amitguptaneedsyou.com/
- Sign up for the Marrow Registry
- Spread the message
Not a lot of things in life are free and satisfying.. This is one of them.
Interesting (infrastructure) tidbits about Groupon
I am attending the Camp DevOps conference in Chicago over the weekend and one of the speakers was Zack Steinkamp. Zack manages the operations tools group in addition to information security at Groupon. He spoke about a custom configuration management tool called “roller” (http://steinkamp.us/campdevops.pdf) that is used at Groupon. He said the tool is scheduled to be open sourced soon. roller is very similar to puppet, chef, bcfg2 etc. I am not sure if we need yet another configuration management tool, but Zack made a good point for why there is a need for a simpler and secure configuration management tool.
Anyways.. this post is not about roller, but rather about some tidbits that Zack shared about Groupon’s infrastructure in the talk
- Groupon started out with ~100 servers
- The operations function was outsourced to a third party
- No automation in place.. all servers were “handcrafted”
- Currently running ~1000 servers in 6 locations (globally)
- Building their own data center
- Running 4 different Linux distros in prod
- Currently using Amazon and another cloud provider
- Not a hugh believer in public cloud for future expansion
- Zack spoke about how the lack of consistency in the IO/CPU performance is an issue on the public clouds
- Does not heavily use virtualization in production
- Uses Nagios for monitoring
- SW Architecture
Only Amazon can make free sound more free :)
I am hoarder :).. Esp for free stuff. That’s one of the reason, I have the Amazon Android App Store on my phone. Amazon gives “away” a free app every day. Even though I don’t really use/need the app that Amazon gives away, I get it, just in case. It is free :), so why not?
The apps usually cost something if brought in the regular app store, but Amazon makes them available for free for a day. So yesterday, I was surprised to see a free app appear in the free app of the day section. What gives?
New Toy..
I confess.. I am a nerd :). Pictures of my new office toy. And if you want to make your co-workers jealous, head over to Josh Welton’s site (http://www.browndogwelding.com/) and order yourself a piece of art.
Thx to D for the great pictures..
RESOLUTIONS : 2011 : May – September Update
After a long hiatus :).. here’s a quick update on my 2011 resolutions. In short.. NOT GOOD.. I haven’t made progress (in fact slid back) on any of the pending items.
- Lose the gut
- I have gained back nearly all the weight I lost.
- I blame it mainly on my mother-in-law :).. She was visiting us for a couple of months and it is amazing what good home cooked food can do to you tummy :).
- I passed the annual insurance discount health check (my cholesterol came down), but need to concentrate on losing the weight.
- Here is the obligatory chart..
- Increase traffic to Kudithipudi.Org
- Again no progress.. haven’t written a lot and the traffic is plateauing as a result.
- CISSP Certification
- The books are serving as decorations for my bookshelves :).. Need I say more.
Thinks look pretty dark eh… Let’s see if we can turn them around. Anyone has ideas on how to stick to the plan?
Coolness factor..
You know, you are working at a cool company, when one of your favorite podcast mentions it in the show :). Check out the September 19th episode of Tech News Today and Tom speaks about how Gogo is going to improve the speed of in-flight Internet access by 4 times.
BTW.. if you want to work at a company that is changing the industry (of in-flight access and entertainment).. we are hiring :).
Inspiration..
I love my “work” to the point that most people that know me think that I am a “workaholic” :). One of the reasons, I love my job is the ability to share my passion for technology. And I know that I am on the right path (despite the long hours), when I receive notes like this (from an ex team-mate)
Hi Vinay,
I hope you are doing great. I would like to take this opportunity to express my thankfulness to you, for introducing us the Modular approach in Perl Scripting during the tenure at TravelClick.
Without your support, I probably wouldn’t have gained confidence to develop script which runs more than 500 lines. Hence I wish to dedicate this script to you.
Btw I started writing a Technical Blog over a year “http://ashok-linux-tips.blogspot.com”. I request you to have a look.
I must admit that the idea of sharing technical solutions via Blog was mainly inspired after seeing your https://kudithipudi.org J
Once again, thanks for all the support extended to us.
Regards
Ashok
Nice job Ashok :).