Surge — A Scalability & Performance Conference, presented by OmniTI.

Surge 2010 Keynote & Speaker List

Discussing Scalability Matters…

…because scalability matters. Surge is more than an event, it's a chance to identify emerging trends and meet the architects behind established technologies. Learn from their mistakes and see how their victories can power your business forward.

Brian Akins Speaker

Brian Akins Chief Operations Engineer, Turner

Brian is currently Chief Engineer at Turner Digital Media Technologies - a division of Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. His primary focus is building scalable web architectures for several popular websites. He believes everyone should know C and is an avid Emacs user. He is a self proclaimed technology hypocrite. It helps that he has a BA in Religion.

He lives with his wife, four kids, two dogs, one cat, and numerous saltwater fish in the suburbs of Atlanta.

Brian's Talks

Don't bet the farm on your cache

Day 2 - 11:00 am

Location: Marble

  • Caching,
  • Recovery

What happens when the one part of your infrastructure that should never go down misbehaves? This is a case-study of all the chaos that ensued when the unthinkable happened -- the cache layer went down. CNN.com endures several DDOS attempts everyday and, on that particular day, someone got lucky. We will discuss several key factors that inevitably caused an outage of one of the world's most popular new sites from a relatively minor DOS attack including:

  • Bugs in code
  • Overzealous configurations
  • Lack of real world testing
  • Insufficient monitoring

We will also discuss the immediate solutions we used to get the site back on the air, as well as the long term fixes to the underlying issues.

Program

Sessions

Speakers will be added as we approach the event dates. Visit back for updates to this page and the Sessions Calendar.