Web Admin Blog

Hadoop Operations: Managaing Big Data Clusters (see link on that page for preso) was given by Jeff Hammerbacher of Cloudera.
Other good references -
book: “Hadoop: The Definitive Guide”
preso: hadoop cluster management from USENIX 2009
Hadoop is an Apache project inspired by Google’s infrastructure; it’s software for programming warehouse-scale computers.
It has recently been split into three main subprojects [...]

The last presentation of the day was by Rich Mogull on “Everything you need to know about cloud security in 30 minutes or less”.  It all started with all of the presentations and diagrams having pictures of clouds so some guy decides to sell that.  Makes security practitioners sad.
Why the cloud is a problem for [...]

Next up at the Cloud Computing and Virtualization Security half-day seminar was a Cloud Computing Panel moderated by Rich Mogull (Analyst/CEO at Securosis) with Josh Zachary (Rackspace), Jim Rymarczk (IBM), and Phil Agcaoili (Dell) participating in the panel.  My notes from the panel discussion are below:
Phil: Little difference between outsources of the past and today’s [...]

The next session during the ISSA half-day seminar on Virtualization and Cloud Computing Security was on security best practices from a customer and vendor perspective.  It featured Brian Engle, CIO of Temple Inland, and Rob Randell, CISSP and Senior Security Specialist at VMware, Inc.  My notes from the presentation are below:
Temple Inland Implementation – Stage [...]

The next presentation at the ISSA half-day seminar was on the “Cloud Security Alliance” and Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing by Jeff Reich.  Here are my notes from this presentation:
Agenda

About the Cloud Security Alliance
Getting Involved
Guidance 1.0
Call to Action

About the Cloud Security Alliance

Not-for-profit organization
Inclusive membership, supporting broad spectrum of subject matter [...]

Today the Austin ISSA and ISACA chapters held a half-day seminar on Cloud Computing and Virtualization Security.  The introduction on cloud computing was given by Vern Williams.  My notes on this topic are below:
5 Key Cloud Characteristics

On-demand self-service
Ubiquitous network access
Location independent resource pooling
Rapid elasticity
Pay per use

3 Cloud Delivery Models

Software as a Service (SaaS): Providers applications [...]

Introduction to Managed Infrastructure with Puppet
by Luke Kanies, Reductive Labs
You can get the work files from git://github.com/reductivelabs/velocity_puppet_workshop_2009.git, and the presentation’s available here.
I saw Luke’s Puppet talk last year at Velocity 2008, but am more ready to start uptaking some conf management back home.  Our UNIX admins use cfengine, and puppet is supposed to be a [...]

The first workshop on Monday morning was called Death of a Web Server: A Crisis in Caching.  The presentation itself is downloadable from that link, so follow along!  I took a lot of notes though because much of this was coding and testing, not pure presentation.  (As with all these session writeups, the presenter or [...]

Velocity 2009 is well underway and going great!  Here’s my blow by blow of how it went down.
Peco, my erstwhile Bulgarian comrade, and I came in to San Jose  from Austin on Sunday.  We got situated at the fairly swank hotel, the Fairmont, and wandered out to find food.  There was some festival going on [...]

You’re in luck!  Peco and I are attending Velocity 2009 and we’ll be taking notes and blogging about the conference.  You can see what to expect by going back and reading my coverage of Velocity 2008!
As Web Admins, we love Velocity.  Usually, we have to bottom-feed at more generalized conferences looking for good relevant content [...]