Category Archives: portfolio

DevOps Demystified – An introduction to the ideas that are driving DevOps

Ben Rockwood is Joyent’s Director of Systems Engineering. Ben will speak about adopting the new philosophy of DevOps. It is about more than what tools you use, its about people first, process second, and then and only then tools. In this talk we’ll discuss the heart of DevOps, deconstruct culture, examine the fields of study upon which DevOps ideas are being drawn, and consider just what makes a tool a “DevOps tool”. You’ll get an overview of where DevOps is today and where it is going in the future.

Enhanced OS Virtualization for the Cloud

Joyent’s Jerry Jelinek speaks at illumos Day.

SmartOS is an Illumos-derived distro developed by Joyent as the base OS for their cloud. This presentation focuses on the OS virtualization capabilities of SmartOS and details the extensive
enhancements made to the OS, based on real-world production experience deploying SmartOS in the Joyent cloud.

Why 4K?

George Wilson at ZFS Day

For over 30 years, hard drives have designated the smallest storage location as 512 bytes. In January 2011, all major hard drive manufactures began shipping their hard drive platforms using a new standard called Advanced Format. To aid in the transition, these new hard drives provide a 512 byte emulation mode that allows the drives to advertise themselves as a 512 byte addressable devices. This can severely impact write performance resulting in the need for read-modify-write operations for any misaligned or partial writes that are issued.

The problem is not limited to just physical hardware. Other storage platforms may also provide LUNs (logical unit number) that presents themselves as a 512 byte addressable devices when, in fact, they use a 4K sector size internally. Although ZFS has built-in support for 4K sectors, it has no automatic way of dealing with the lies that the storage devices tell. This talk will focus on the methods that have been developed to work around the lies that hard drive storage platforms tell and will discuss the challenges and drawbacks that come with using 4K sectors.

SmartOS Operations – Ben Rockwood at illumos Day

On illumos Day http://zfsday.com/about-illumos-day/, Joyent’s own Ben Rockwood http://cuddletech.com/blog/ gave us an in-depth look at the tools and techniques he uses to manage Joyent’s public cloud http://joyent.com/ on SmartOS http://smartos.org/, covering everything from monitoring to configuration management and troubleshooting. Here’s video of the complete talk: 55 minutes of deep devops goodness, packed full of knowledge – and humor.