From Grumpy's Garage

Image credit: Google Gemini Failure Is Not an Option; It’s Required To be presented at the Cascadia IT Conference , Seattle, WA, March 7-8, 2014  (55 minutes) Abstract Google SREs (system reliability engineers) spend almost 90% of their time handling or anticipating failure 1 . Managing failure is at the core of keeping Google services as reliable as they are. In this workshop, we will explore some of the principles Google employs to make services reliable and how you might use them in your work. Everything fails. With a little planning, you can fail well. Shorter Summary A workshop to explore some ways that Google SRE makes Google as reliable as it is, and how you can make your services more reliable, too, with a focus on failing well. More About Me Brian Haney has been a system administrator and SRE systems engineer for seven years. When not writing, speaking or teaching, he helps maintain some of Google’s internal storage infrastructure. Notes: 1: I posit this without comprehens...

"The Cloud" is an overloaded term. In tech-speak, "overloaded" means that people use the same term to mean different things. Computer geeks like to connect computers to each other and make them talk to each other in electronic ones and zeros, making a computer "network".  Some computers on the network might have special jobs, like listening for incoming email messages or accepting requests to download any new messages. A file server is a place to copy files to or from.  A web server is just a file server that listens for requests, usually from anywhere and in a certain protocol. Those files are in a particular format, like hypertext markup language (HTML), and often have references to other files also on the web server, like images and videos. You might have special devices on your network, like security cameras, web TVs, or wi-fi access radios. Somewhere, your network has a box that is also connected to the Internet, your Internet "router". A ro...

Last week I started listening to the audio book, Guerilla Marketing for the Home-Based Business . At the gym, I got as far as the chapter Direct Mail. I hate junk mail. I expected that chapter to be completely worthless. I was wrong. I Guerilla Marketer doesn't use direct mail to mean mass mailings. The Guerilla Marketer can fine tune their target mailing list to zoom in on key prospects. What's more, since you're not mailing to millions "OCCUPANTs", you can invest more in your message and presentation and even go so far as to make each direct mail piece a little more customized than just the mailing label and salutation. I found myself brainstorming about what value-added content I could fit onto an 8-1/2" x 11" three-panel brochure. A cheat sheet of the most important WordPress command? Wait. No, that won't work. WordPress doesn't have a command line. A checklist that every webmaster should go through every week? That sounds reasonable. Those p...

I've started reading Lean Analytics , and I feel like I've had an epiphany. It's not a miraculous vision of the future, but it feels like a light bulb just went on in my head. Running a startup is a lot like leading an expedition. You know pretty much where you started, and you kinda know where you want to be. (You might not be able to pin it on a map, but you'll know it when you see it.) And sometimes your destination moves while you are on your way. You need to survey the landscape, identify a likely route, follow that route, and monitor your progress. Sometimes you'll realize that your not quite on the right track, so you'll need execute a course correction, a pivot. You might need to plot a path around The Abyss of Over-Planning and tread lightly through Feature Bloat Tar Sands, but you can't get to your destination without starting, and you're better off knowing your relative progress from where you started, even if you're not sure of the distan...

I'm getting frazzled. Yesterday I got invited to join some other Seattle Lean Startup fans next Monday in a book reading group (see my recent post about Lean Analytics ). Cool. I accepted. Then I got invited to Kirkland for a reprise of the Google Developer Group talk about Autoscaler on the same night. Well, I heard half of the first one in Seattle last month. I'll pass. Then I got invited to Redmond for a WordPress discussion on that night about how to focus your blog . But Redmond is so out of my way. Can we do it again in Seattle? (Working on that. Stay tuned.) Wow! Monday is popular! But I'll stick with the Lean Analytics book group. But then, before I could break out my copy of Lean Analytics and start preparing for that meeting, I got invited to a discussion tomorrow night by the Seattle Area System Administrators Guild (SASAG ) about the OpenStack Swift storage system and how to deploy it. I recently got the OpenStack Swift book, and it *was* further down my rea...

I just got invited to a Seattle Lean Startup book group to discuss a book that is next on my reading list, Lean Analytics , by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz. I'm a Google engineer. As a species, we live by data. Analytics are our friends. But I've been meaning to learn more about the tools to make analytics useful. I'll have to get to this book sooner than I expected so I can speak intelligently about it at this Meetup next Monday.

I'm so glad that Chrome is a secure browser. No, really. I got a free SSL server certificate from StartSSL.com, installed it, and tested access to my site. But Chrome gave the BAD SSL icon. So I installed the certificate a little differently. Same result. Yet a different way. Still the same result. It wasn't until I actually looked up the error message that I learned that Chrome was head and shoulders more secure than any other browser out there, supporting Certificate Transparency  (CT), and the Certificate Authorities aren't keeping up (some, like StartSSL, by choice ). The short version is that Chrome supports a new SSL initiative, promoted by Google, to have browsers compare a website's SSL certificate with a log database published by the certificate authorities. If the certificate authority won't verify the issuance of the certificate in real time, Chrome indicates that the SSL connection is not as good as it could be. I don't know of any other browsers tha...

I've been thinking a lot lately about my value proposition. What value do I want my customers to receive from my services? When I deliver monitoring services to network service providers, I want them to be able to get a good night's sleep knowing that my service will wake them up if anything is behaving badly. The have freedom from worry so they can rest well. When I answer questions for cloud customers, the value I deliver is that they are confident that they have the tools to deliver their services to their own customers. They enjoy the freedom to focus on their core services, not on managing infrastructure. But what value can I bring to the community of micro-entrepreneurs? I can show how to leverage Internet technology. I can even help them leverage that technology to deliver value to their own customers. But how can I encapsulate that into a product or service? What am I selling to that community? These questions vex me, and I don't have the answers, yet. Ultimately, I...

I ran across a cool book at the Lynnwood library this week: The Message of You , by Judy Carter. It fits rather well into my growing YOU library, right next to: Business Model You, by Timothy Clark and Alexander Osterwalder The Startup of You, by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, and The Economy of You, by Kimberly Palmer. The Message of You is aimed at people who aspire to become professional speakers, but the message of this book is so much more than that. Carter's premise is that everyone has a compelling story to tell, something meaningful and inspiring, and that that could form the cornerstone of the reader's new career as a paid professional speaker. But your story can go farther. Much farther. Every blogger has a story to tell. Every writer. Well, everybody. So tell your story. In this Internet Age, people seem to thrive on anonymity, on hiding in the corners of cyberspace, staying unidentified and unknown. But we are seeing a revolution in cyberspace. The Internet ...