ApacheCon US 2009 was a celebration of 10 years of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and OmniTI CEO Theo Schlossnagle and Web Engineer Rich Bowen were both present, not only to help celebrate, but to share their knowledge and experience.
On Thursday morning, Rich talked about the basics of mod_rewrite syntax, pattern lexicons and common rewrite scenarios. He focused on teaching attendees how mod_rewrite mangles and munges URLs in order to make them easy to work with.
Rich recently joined OmniTI as a web engineer, and is the author of Apache Cookbook and The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite. His expertise as part of the Apache Software Foundation and his role as a member of the Apache Documentation Project allows OmniTI to harness his experience and expand client service offerings. His appearance also further bolsters OmniTI’s prominent position within the open source community.
I feel very privileged to join OmniTI, as my role lets me use my expertise to help real companies do exciting things, while maintaining my edge with a wide scope of technologies, including Apache, mod_perl, Perl, and PHP.
On Thursday afternoon, Theo hosted a two—hour session entitled “Scalable Internet Architectures.” He dove into traditional web architectures and explored what makes them work, with a particular focus on analyzing weak points and discussing the effects of the intense pressure that can result from prolonged exposure on prominent web properties like Digg and The New York Times. Theo also drew heavily upon his years of experience in systems monitoring, especially the lessons he’s learned that have culminated in the recent development, release and deployment of OmniTI’s open source monitoring and trending system, Reconnoiter.
If you monitor systems and services, today, without monitoring critical business metrics as well, you are placing yourself at a disadvantage that could be fatal,” said Schlossnagle. “In my session, I plan to share the same expertise in the trending of systems, applications and network metrics that has been captured in Reconnoiter, which has made great strides in both fundamental design and usability.
Apachecon attendees walked away from Rich’s talk with a great understanding of how to use mod_rewrite to its full capabilities. From comments on Twitter, it was apparent that his audience appreciated his in—depth knowledge and clear explanations. His insight into upcoming new features in Apache 2.4 also had many attendees excited for the upcoming release.
Theo drew laughs from the crowd when describing how sharding can be painful, as well as great comments on Twitter for the overall presentation, such as
Theo Schlossnagle’s “Scalable Internet Architectures” is so much fun and informative
Theo explained what architecture means for Internet applications, from static content and dynamic applications to databases and networking. Attendees learned that they need to be aware of how the different levels in architecture interact, and that “fixing” a scaling issue should not simply change the problem. Finally, they learned how good performance can make scaling issues much easier to solve.