Top Experts in Web Performance and Operations Draw High Turnout
O’Reilly Velocity Conference Shows How to Achieve Website Speed and Reliability

Sebastopol, CA, July 16, 2009—The second year of the O'’Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference drew more than 700 web developers and experts, a larger group than attended last year’s, to San Jose June 22-24, 2009. They came to Velocity to pose their toughest questions to the people doing the best performance and operations work in the world.

“The fact that attendance has surpassed last year says something about the growing importance of this new field,” said O’Reilly Media founder and CEO, Tim O’Reilly.

Conference co-chairs Steve Souders of Google and Jesse Robbins of OpsCode and O’Reilly Radar designed the three-day conference with dedicated tracks for both web performance and web operations. Among nearly 80 speakers were some of the most innovative minds at industry-leading companies.

Read the full press release.

The second edition of Velocity, the Web Performance and Operations Conference from O’Reilly, is just about four weeks away. Program co-chairs Jesse Robbins (recently named Geek of the Week by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) and Steve Souders are putting the final touches on the program; new speakers just confirmed include:

• Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer of Mozilla will delve into developer tools used to enhance web performance in their presentation, On Responsiveness
• Randy Bias, Technology Strategy VP at GoGrid, will chart the tactical and strategic vision around the technology for the GoGrid cloud computing platform
• In Go with the Reflow, Google’s Lindsey Simon will present some findings from testing reflow times in a variety of browsers under different conditions

For another peek into what’s in store at Velocity, be sure to read James Turner’s interview with Microsoft’s Eric Schurman, The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number.

Everyone who registers for Velocity by May 3 not only saves up to $150, but is also entered to win one free night at The Fairmont (during Velocity conference dates only).

The downturn is no time for downtime. If you are tasked with building faster sites, designing scalable infrastructure, and delivering a superior, always-available customer experience, Velocity is the single best place to go for crucial skills and knowledge.

Whether you work for a top-flight company or are a freelance rock star, Velocity addresses the tangibles and intangibles you are already taking into consideration when planning your conference budget for this year, from ROI, tools, and techniques to networking with experts and sharpening marketable job skills.

Just a few of the top practitioners you’ll hear from include:

• Dave Artz (AOL), The Secret Weapons of teh AOL Optimization Team
• Brad Chen (Google), Native CPU Performance in the Browser with Google Native Client
• Alan Kasindorf (Six Apart), Load Balanced Roundup
• Yaron Friedman (Google), High Performance Search at Google
• Eric Mattingly (Microsoft), Creating Instant Response Time Predictions with neXpert
• Aladdin Nassar (Microsoft/Hotmail), Performance-Based Design: Linking Performance to Business Metrics
• Alistair Croll (Bitcurrent) & Sean Power (Akoha), What the Rest of the Company Knows About Your Website
• Theo Schlossnagle (OmniTI), Scalable Internet Architectures
• Tenni Theurer (Yahoo!), Coding for Greener Applications: Style Makes a Difference

If you’re planning to attend, we encourage you to book a room now at The Fairmont San Jose to put yourself close to the action and increase your opportunities the conversations and revelations happen between attendees after the session are done for the day.

Program Teaches How to Build a Better Internet

Sebastopol, CA, March 5, 2009—O’Reilly Media has opened early registration for Velocity, the Web Performance and Operations Conference on June 22-24, 2009, at the Fairmont in San Jose, CA. Program chairs Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders have revealed the program for this three-day event dedicated to helping people build better infrastructures. Early registration savings of up to $300 end May 3, 2009.

Velocity provides the place to learn how to build websites and services that raise the standards for fast, scalable, efficient, and reliable performance. Velocity 2009 focuses on accomplishing more with fewer resources, efficient design and scaling techniques, and the best ways to manage change. The program also highlights best practices in performance and operations that improve the user experience as well as the company’s bottom line.

Read the full press release.

Program chairs Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders have just unveiled the schedule for the second edition of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference. Building on the very successful premiere of the event last year, Velocity will feature some of the most talented experts in the business, giving all participants the skills and knowledge they need to raise their game and beef up the bottom line–critical functions in this down economy.

A sampling of the speakers and topics on the agenda include:

• Luke Kanies (Reductive Labs), Introduction to Managed Infrastructure with Puppet
• Mandi Walls (AOL), Migrating www.aol.com from a Proprietary Web Platform to Open Source
• John Allspaw and Paul Hammond (Flickr), 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr
• Bill Scott (Netflix), Event Delegation: Speeding Up the Netflix Queue
• Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!), Ajax Performance
• Richard Campbell (Strangeloop Networks), Death of a Web Server: Crisis in Caching
• Jeremy Zawodny (Craigslist), MySQL Performance from Day #1
• John Adams (Twitter), Fixing Twitter: Improving Its Performance and Scalability
• Stoyan Stefanov (Yahoo!), YSlow 2.0
• Robert Johnson (Facebook), High Performance at Massive Scale - Lessons Learned at Facebook
• Nicole Sullivan, Nine Ways Engineering and Design Come Together to Make Your Site Slow
• Nicholas Zakas (Yahoo!), Writing Efficient JavaScript

New to Velocity 2009 is a full day of workshops, which will immerse participants more deeply into essential issues for making websites fast, scalable, efficient, and available.

Registration is also open; the early registration discount ends May 4.

11:59 p.m. Jan. 12 is the deadline to submit speaking proposals for Velocity, the O’Reilly conference on web performance and operations. The program committee is interested in presentations for a variety of skill levels around the following topics:

• How to tie web performance and operations to the bottom line
• Real-world incident management - getting “tight like a pit crew”
• Making websites as fast and reliable as desktop apps
• Networking, DNS, and load balancing
• Profiling’s not just on the backend: JavaScript, CSS, and the network
• Managing web services - flaming disasters you survived and lessons learned
• The intersection between performance and design
• Wicked cool (and actionable) metrics
• Ads, ads, ads - the performance killer?
• Troubleshooting in production
• How to scale and be fast on the social web
• Capacity planning and load testing
• Establishing performance and operations best practices within your organization
• Configuration management best (and worst) tools and practices
• Monitoring and instrumentation: Open Source, as a service, commercially supported solutions
• Using multiple CDNs to improve customer experience and reduce cost

A limited number of speaking opportunities are also available through conference sponsorship. Contact Sharon Cordesse at scordesse@oreilly.com for more information.

11:59 p.m. Jan. 12 is the deadline to submit speaking proposals for Velocity, the O’Reilly conference on web performance and operations. The program committee is interested in presentations for a variety of skill levels around the following topics:

• How to tie web performance and operations to the bottom line
• Real-world incident management - getting “tight like a pit crew”
• Making websites as fast and reliable as desktop apps
• Networking, DNS, and load balancing
• Profiling’s not just on the backend: JavaScript, CSS, and the network
• Managing web services - flaming disasters you survived and lessons learned
• The intersection between performance and design
• Wicked cool (and actionable) metrics
• Ads, ads, ads - the performance killer?
• Troubleshooting in production
• How to scale and be fast on the social web
• Capacity planning and load testing
• Establishing performance and operations best practices within your organization
• Configuration management best (and worst) tools and practices
• Monitoring and instrumentation: Open Source, as a service, commercially supported solutions
• Using multiple CDNs to improve customer experience and reduce cost

A limited number of speaking opportunities are also available through conference sponsorship. Contact Sharon Cordesse at scordesse@oreilly.com for more information.

O’Reilly Conference Opens Call for Participation

Sebastopol, CA, November 17—Want to make your websites fast, scalable, efficient, and reliable? O’Reilly’s Velocity, the Web Performance and Operations Conference on June 22-24, 2009, at the Fairmont in San Jose, CA, shows how to develop those traits. Dedicated to helping people build better infrastructures, Velocity offers developers and engineers the key for crossing over from cool Web 2.0 features to sustainable websites. Program chairs Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders have opened the call for participation and invite proposals for conference sessions, panels, and a newly added full day of tutorials at Velocity 2009.

“Velocity pulls together industry leaders covering the most important areas of web performance and operations. I’m looking forward to discussing how to get the most out of the latest browsers including Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Safari 4, and Chrome. The competition is really strong in this area, especially with regard to JavaScript performance,” says Steve. “Another theme we’re highlighting is best practices in performance and operations that improve the user experience as well as the company’s bottom line. These are the best kind of win-win optimizations that everyone can rally behind.”

Read full press release.

EOD Jan. 12 is the deadline to submit speaking proposals for Velocity, the O’Reilly conference on web performance and operations. The program committee is interested in presentations for a variety of skill levels around the following topics:

• How to tie web performance and operations to the bottom line
• Real-world incident management - getting “tight like a pit crew”
• Making websites as fast and reliable as desktop apps
• Networking, DNS, and load balancing
• Profiling’s not just on the backend: JavaScript, CSS, and the network
• Managing web services - flaming disasters you survived and lessons learned
• The intersection between performance and design
• Wicked cool (and actionable) metrics
• Ads, ads, ads - the performance killer?
• Troubleshooting in production
• How to scale and be fast on the social web
• Capacity planning and load testing
• Establishing performance and operations best practices within your organization
• Configuration management best (and worst) tools and practices
• Monitoring and instrumentation: Open Source, as a service, commercially supported solutions
• Using multiple CDNs to improve customer experience and reduce cost

A limited number of speaking opportunities are also available through conference sponsorship. Contact Sharon Cordesse at scordesse@oreilly.com for more information.

O’Reilly Conference Opens Call for Participation

Sebastopol, CA, November 17—Want to make your websites fast, scalable, efficient, and reliable? O’Reilly’s Velocity, the Web Performance and Operations Conference on June 22-24, 2009, at the Fairmont in San Jose, CA, shows how to develop those traits. Dedicated to helping people build better infrastructures, Velocity offers developers and engineers the key for crossing over from cool Web 2.0 features to sustainable websites. Program chairs Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders have opened the call for participation and invite proposals for conference sessions, panels, and a newly added full day of tutorials at Velocity 2009.

“Velocity pulls together industry leaders covering the most important areas of web performance and operations. I’m looking forward to discussing how to get the most out of the latest browsers including Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Safari 4, and Chrome. The competition is really strong in this area, especially with regard to JavaScript performance,” says Steve. “Another theme we’re highlighting is best practices in performance and operations that improve the user experience as well as the company’s bottom line. These are the best kind of win-win optimizations that everyone can rally behind.”

Read full press release.

Harish Mallipeddi’s Blog: Commenting on Velocity ‘08

I finally had time tonight to look at the presentations from Velocity 08. If you’re interested, they’re all available on the Oreilly conference website.

Personally I thought the following two talks were awesome:

* Capacity Management by John Allspaw (Flickr Ops Mgr)

* Building an Automated Infrastructure by Adam Jacob

Read more

Jesse Robbin’s experiences as an emergency responder at Hurricane Katrina introduce this piece on mapping tools designed for use during disasters.

“When these sites go away, it’s a sudden loss. It’s like you are standing in the middle of Macy’s and the power goes out. When the thing you depend on to live your daily life suddenly goes away, it’s trauma…These companies have a responsibility to people who rely and depend on them, just as people going over a public bridge expect that the bridge won’t suddenly collapse,” says Velocity cochair Jesse Robbins in Brad Stone’s article on Web sites’ performance.

Teen blogger Daniel Brusilovsky used his first conference media pass to produce great coverage of the introduction of CloudStatus, learn about Device Anywhere, and for some live blogging of the conference’s opening hours.

“Domas Mituzas of MySQL/Sun gave a presentation Monday at the Velocity conference that provided an inside look at the technology behind Wikipedia, which he calls an ‘operations underdog,’” writes Rich Miller.

Stephen Shankland on Google engineer Luis Barroso’s discussion of models servers can use to increase efficiency by lowering power consumption.

Rich Miller covers another major announcement from Velocity.

Rich Miller reports on Bill Coleman’s Velocity keynote, “Sometimes the path to a greener data center happens in small steps that appear obvious but often are left undone.”

Valleywag on Velocity: “If you’re not there right now, show up tomorrow and figure out how to make your site run harder, better, faster, stronger. ”

Datacenter Junkie Michael Halligan summarizes the first morning at Velocity.

Examiner.com includes a great quote from program Jesse Robbins in
this announcement.

Over on the O’Reilly Radar, Velocity co-chair Jesse Robbins notes that two new projects will be launched at the conference: Jiffy and EUCALPYTUS.

The keynote presentation line-up for Velocity has been confirmed, and it looks like an excellent mix of speakers and ideas:

• Bill Coleman (Cassatt Corporation), “Green Data Centers”
• Vik Chaudhary (Keynote Systems, Inc.), “Keynote Systems Launches KITE”
• John Fowler (Sun Microsystems), “Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure”
• Javier Soltero (Hyperic, Inc.), “Clouds Are No Substitute for Competence”
• Harald Prokop (Akamai Technologies), “How to Accelerate Non-cacheable, Dynamic Sites Leveraging a Globally Distributed Platform”
• Sean Quinlan (Google, Inc.), “Storage at Scale”

And here’s the full conference schedule.

The inaugural Velocity conference will feature Ignite! on Monday, June 23 at 8:45 p.m. Each of the 16 Ignite! talks will be five minutes long–20 slides at only 15 seconds a slide. There are still a few slots open for cool ideas, hacks, and lessons. If you’d like to share your war stories with a lot of other web performance and ops practitioners, submit a proposal by June 9. Velocity co-chair Jesse Robbins will be accepting and announcing good talks as they come in, with the final lineup posted on June 13. Remember, Ignite Velocity is free and will be open to all.

Adam Jacob joins Velocity program co-chair Jesse Robbins for a discussion around automated infrastructure, iClassify, and Puppet on IT Conversations’ Technometria series with Phil Windley.

Velocity conference co-chair Steve Souders recently participated in a webcast on “Even Faster Web Sites”:

Brady Forrest has posted an entry about one of the co-chairs of Velocity:
“Last week Steve Souders, the author of the O’Reilly book High Performance Web Sites and creator of Firefox plugin YSlow, presented his latest website performance findings at the Web 2.0 Expo.”

Steve Souders, co-chair of Velocity and author of High Performance Web Sites (at one point the #1 selling computer book on Amazon) will explain the Performance Golden Rule, review his performance best practices, and use YSlow to analyze the top web sites in the world. Introducing Steve will be Andy Oram, author, blogger, and senior editor for O’Reilly Media.

This is a free live event taking place Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 17:00 GMT for approximately 45 minutes. Attendance is limited, so register now. We’ll send you a reminder before the webcast. And please feel free to invite your friends and colleagues to join in!

Media partner Programmers Heaven has posted a summary of the conference.

We’ve just heard from program co-chairs Steve Souders and Jesse Robbins that more speakers have been added to the schedule for Velocity, our new web performance and operations conference, including Bill Scott from Netlix on Measuring Performance. The speaker list now includes folks from Microsoft, AOL, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, Mozilla, Farecast, LinkedIn, OpenDNS, plus many others sharing perspectives and expertise.

Brand new to the O’Reilly conference line-up this year is Velocity and we’re excited to be opening up a conversation in this space. Program chairs Steve Souders and Jesse Robbins have just unveiled the preliminary line-up of speakers and sessions, which follow two tracks: Performance and Operations. (Registering by May 5 saves you 350 bucks, too.)

A nice mention in the Config-mgmt mailing list blog regarding Velocity:

Looks like it’s pretty web-site focused, but it should be interesting
for others, too.

Nice Velocity mention….

Still want to know more? If so, you should enlist for O’Reilly media’s planned Velocity conference in San Fransisco June 23-24 next year, which they claim is a first of its kind. In addition to Cal Henderson, Amazon.com and other global web sites will be presenting.

Here’s a mention for our latest conference: Velocity:

O’Reilly has announced a new conference called Velocity. From their front page:

Steve Souders, co-chair blogged about Velocity on Yahoo’s Developer Network:

O’Reilly just announced Velocity, their first conference focused on web performance and operations. It’s scheduled for June 23-24, 2008 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott in Burlingame. I’m proud to say that Jesse Robbins and I are co-chairing Velocity.

Velocity conference co-chair, Jesse Robbins, posted the following:

I’m happy to announce that Steve Souders and I will be co-chairing Velocity, the new O’Reilly conference dedicated to Web Performance and Operations.

Start your engines ladies and gentleman, Velocity 2008 call for participation is officially open!

Velocity Press Release

Tim recently had an O’Reilly Radar post on high performance websites, which includes a discussion on our new conference: Velocity:

We’ve long believed that one of the side-effects of Web 2.0 and the demands of the internet as platform is that more is required of web sites than ever before in terms of availability, performance, and scalability