I’m in London now for Carsonified’s Future of Web Apps conference. For the next two days I’ll be listening to talks from a variety of interesting speakers involved in web apps in various capacities. Friday is the conference workshop day, and in the afternoon I’ll be running a workshop on Scaling the LAMP Stack.

I’m also in London for a couple of extra days, so if you’re in town (at the conference or not), let me know.

Activities have been high, and growth has been steady. Things are looking up here in Seattle.

After four months here in the northern reaches of our Pacific coast, I have to say that coming up this way has been a good idea. The weather’s been good, even when it’s been bad. See, I like the rain.

We’re settled into our house, we have made a friend or two, and there are other good things goin’ on with and around us. Between a party or two, enjoying fresh Veggies from Pati’s garden and going out shooting things with a camera with Pati, Linda and Michael, it’s been good so far.

Speaking of shooting, Michael and Pati are both into photography, but of different natures. I’ll end this with a shot taken on Friday by Michael at Kerry Park in Queen Ann.

Well, back to building out that next cabinet.

To all BitPusher customers,

Our data center has informed us that they need to do maintenance on the power system in the next few days in order to prevent an unscheduled outage in the future. They have schedule an outage which will require us to take down all services based in our main (Seattle) data center.

The time during which BitPusher customer services will be down is (in PDT — see below for other time zones):
Thursday, September 14 18:50 to 19:30 (40 minutes)

All services based on our Seattle data center will be shut down at 18:50. This will be a clean shutdown. As soon as the power work is complete we will restore services. All services will be restored by 19:30.

We apologize for any inconvenience this will cause. Please let us know if you have any questions of if there is anything we can do to mitigate the impact for you and your customers.

Here is the start time of the outage in other time zones:
Friday, September 14 01:50 UTC
Thursday, September 13 18:50 PDT (US West Coast)
Thursday, September 13 21:50 EDT (US East Coast)
Friday, September 14 02:50 BST (United Kingdom)
Friday, September 14 03:50 CEST (France)
Friday, September 14 11:50 Aus. EST (Eastern Australia)

Michael T. Halligan
————————
Chief Technology Officer
888-978-7437
BitPusher, LLC
http://www.bitpusher.com/

The Economies of Focus talk I gave at Google last week is now on Google Video:

If you have feedback on the talk, please leave a comment or get in touch.

If you’re coming to the SASAG meeting next week, you might not want to watch this first, since it will be pretty much the same talk. Or maybe you do so you can heckle me better.

Technorati Tags: google, bitpusher, economies of focus, daniellieberman

A friend of mine at Google asked me to put together a talk on on how BitPusher works, and in particular how a small company provides a managed services offering that competes effectively with huge companies. Here’s the description of the resulting talk:

Economies of Focus: How Little Guys Compete in Big Spaces

BitPusher is a small company that provides outsourced web operations and hosting for customer web applications. CEO Daniel Lieberman will discuss the philosophies, techniques and compromises that allow a very small team to deploy new, diverse applications rapidly while keeping their ops environment manageable. In particular, Daniel will describe how BitPusher achieves economies of scale in a diverse environment by choosing their focus areas carefully, making BitPusher efficient enough to complete with big IT consultancies and the services arms of telecom companies.

I’ll be giving this talk at Google this Thursday and then again (open to the public) on August 7 at 7PM at SASAG in Seattle. (I may present it again elsewhere if there’s interest.) The plan is for a video of the talk at Google to be made available on-line as well.

Technorati Tags: bitpusher, sasag, google, tech talk

As expensive as it was, it was absolutely the right system to move BitPusher’s critical infrastructure off of California’s over-burdened power grid.

Apparently a transformer exploded under the 560 Mission PG&E Substation in San Francisco, knocking out part of the grid for about 24,000 people. Unfortunately, this happened in the SoMA neighborhood, otherwise known as datacenter alley where 365main, JMA Wired, ServePath, 650 Townsend, and Level3 (amongst others) have datacenters. Apparently the datacenter we moved out of, 365main, had some problems dealing with this power outage.

• Power Outages In San Francisco
• 365Main datacenter power outage
  
• At least 20,000 without power in San Francisco

Technorati Tags: 365main, pg&e, pge, datacenters, colo, power outage

I’m very happy to introduce myself as the newest member of the BitPusher crew. Michael and Daniel have asked me to be the Office Manager for the new offices that are to be opening soon at data center here in Seattle.

Having also recently moved here from San Francisco Bay Area, I am very excited to be able to explore a whole new place. The Puget Sound and Canada are both places that have been on my long list of places to visit.

I can’t wait for our new offices to open, as well as grow with the company!

–Pati

To the extent that things at BitPusher ever settle down, things have settled down after the move to Seattle.

We’re already seeing benefits from move. One big networking snafu notwithstanding, the combination of better and beefier shared infrastructure with the opportunity to rebuild our customer servers has noticeably reduced the frequency of operational incidents. In practical terms, this has meant fewer pages for our operations team and fewer process restarts — things that most people don’t notice, but they take up our time and can cause brief downtimes or cause end user sessions to be lost.

But perhaps the biggest difference is in the little ways we’ve made the infrastructure simpler and tidier. It may sound silly to dictate that the server in slot 13 in cabinet 2 will be known as sea-c02-s13 and be must be plugged in to port 13 on the both the remote-control power system and each of the three network switches to which it is connected (two redundant data connections plus one for the lights-out management), but in the end it saves time and avoids confusion, as well as eliminating the need to maintain much of a cable map.

Rebuilding customer servers, as we did during the move, has meant that everything (well, almost everything) is now set up according to our latest best practices. While we always kept the servers up to date in terms of patches and such that affect security and stability, many of the details of how we configure networking, choose file paths, etc. have changed in the three years since we moved in to our previous data center, and some of those are harder to update. Rebuilding gave us a chance to update them. (We’ve also learned a lot about what to do and not do when rebuilding customer environments, so it will be easier to do limited rebuilds to keep things up to the latest spec in the future.)

Improvements in the physical data center space make a big difference, too. In addition to better power and cooling and having plenty of room to expand, it helps a great deal to have better cable management, a simplified and easier-to-manage scheme for labeling servers, and more storage space for easier management of spare parts.

When trying to keep a complicated environment running smoothly, the little things make a big difference.

Pati became a BitPusher on June 4th, 2007. Here she is sporting the latest in BitPusher’s line of blue fedoras. Pati is BitPusher’s first Executive Assistant, and will be wearing more hats than they have at The Hat Guys in Oakland, CA.

I appear to have moved to Seattle. Suddenly, my surroundings are different, and my bed 99% closer to the datacenter.

The house is old, but still standing (actually, it’s quite nice) at it’s centenial year. It’s big, red, and has a commanding view, not to mention $4 cheaper than my 20% smaller apartment in San Jose. Big apartment versus bigger house for a frapaccino less in cash. You do the math.

The story is this: Michael flew me up here to Seattle to do some work for him. Then he moved up here, moved the datacenter up here, and flew me up here to do work for him a few more times. It went on like this for months, when suddenly, I’m unloading a truck into the new house.

It’s nice up here, and it’s good to be able to get to the datacenter in under 4 hours. The food in SJ is better, but the people up here seem nicer, in general. Nice people are often unsuspecting.

In the meantime, I’ll post again in a week, after I get all those machines I lugged with me installed and ready for new or expanding customers.

TTFN-

Dirk R