Steve Vinoski's Blog

At QCon London March 7-9 I’ll be hosting a track on Highly Available Systems, which I’ll describe in more detail below.

But first, be aware that if you register for the conference using promotion code VINO100, you’ll save yourself £100 off the registration fee plus I’ll donate £100 to the World Food Programme.

This track is compelling. As track host I focused on inviting speakers with significant experience in building and deploying real working systems that exhibit high availability, with the goal of maximizing the transfer of ideas, approaches, tools, and techniques from the speakers to the attendees.

• The track kicks off with Joe Armstrong, the father of Erlang, talking about building highly-available systems with Erlang.
• Next up, Mark McGranaghan of Heroku will present approaches they use at Heroku to ensure high availability.
• After lunch, John Allspaw of Etsy will talk about fault tolerance, anomaly detection, and anticipation patterns. John is well known for his excellent books on capacity planning and web operations. John is also giving the Friday morning keynote, “Resilient Response In Complex Systems”.
• Following John will be Jodi Moran, CTO at Plumbee, who will tell us about what it takes to build systems capable of going from zero to ten million users in 4 weeks.
• We’ll wrap up the track with Martin Thompson, a specialist in high-speed, highly-available and low-latency systems who helped build the LMAX Disruptor, who will talk about event-sourced architectures and what we’ve forgotten about high availability.

It’s gonna be great, no doubt, and I’m really looking forward to it. Hope to see you there!

I’ll also be giving a talk at the conference about distributed systems and Riak Core.

While attending QCon recently I also spoke at the London Erlang User Group meeting. I gave a quick talk about Erlang Native Implemented Functions (NIFs) as used in my little erlsha2 implementation. Slides are here (pdf).

QCon London is coming up fast, March 9-11, and I’ll be running the “Functional Web” track there and also speaking in the “When Things Break” track.

You’ll save £100 if you use my promotion code, VINO100, when you register for the conference, and in doing so you’ll also help me cover my travel costs since the conference will give me an extra £100 when you use my code. (By default the conference covers some, but not all, speaker travel expenses, and my employer doesn’t contribute at all to my travel expenses).

By popular demand the deadline for paper submissions to WS-REST 2011 has been extended to February 10th.

InfoQ recently posted my keynote from the March 2010 Erlang Factory Bay Area. The keynote, entitled Using Erlang in a Carrier-Grade Media Distribution Switch, presents some of the work my colleagues and I at Verivue have been engaged in over the past few years. Since it was an Erlang conference, the talk naturally focuses on the Erlang aspects of the work.