Top all-time · #3423
Adrian Cockcroft
Personal blog · perfcap.blogspot.comsystemsprogramming
Adrian Cockcroft's personal blog at perfcap.blogspot.com covers systems and programming. Since 2010, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Understanding and using Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store”. The last post was in 2014, but the archive is still widely read.
Started in 2004. Covers anything I find interesting, like clouds, cars and strange complex music. Views expressed are my own and not those of my employers (currently AWS). See also @adrianco
Most-linked posts?
- Understanding and using Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-03-20
- Thoughts on DynamoDB From a Netflix Engineer3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-01-22
- I come to use clouds, not to build them2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-08-31
- Comparing NoSQL Availability Models2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-11-05
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-06-03
What Hacker News says?
A blunt summary would be that everything is unreliable and disposable. You have to design for failure, because most things will almost certainly fail (or just slow down) at some point. I learned a lot when I was first moving to the cloud from Adrian Cockroft. He has a ton of material out there from Netflix's move to the cloud. I recommend googling around for his conference talks. (I haven't watched these, but they'r…
Comment linking /2012/03/cloud-architecture-tutorial.html
on “How We Knew It Was Time to Leave the Cloud”Submitted Understanding and using Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store as a story · 61 points
HN discussionThanks for sharing the experience. In your particular case it seems the right decision to move to a dedicated provider. The reasoning was similar to GitHub's ( https://github.com/blog/493-github-is-moving-to-rackspace ) Cloud environments make the most sense at either end of the spectrum. It works if you are Netflix, where the choice is not to purchase a few servers but build your own Cloud infrastructure ( http://p…
Comment linking /2011/08/i-come-to-use-clouds-not-to-build-them.html
on “Why We Moved Off The Cloud”Submitted Thoughts on SimpleDB, DynamoDB and Cassandra as a story · 13 points
HN discussionWhat size were the EBS volumes? Would be interesting how important the volume size is to performance. If you only provision 1TB (or larger if they have them available now) EBS volumes then you'd have spindles dedicated to you whereas with smaller ones there might be a lot more variations because you share. More background: http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2011/03/understanding-and-using-...
Comment linking /2011/03/understanding-and-using-amazon-ebs.html
on “EC2 I/O”Submitted NoSQL Netflix Use Case Comparison for Riak as a story · 11 points
HN discussionNetflix uses more than one CDN, and, according to posts by their one of their architects (Adrian Cockroft http://perfcap.blogspot.com/ ), they use EC2 for everything but some basic in-house HR/backoffice stuff. He's got DOZENS of posts on how it works for them, how they full embraced ec2, etc. and how well it's working for them.
Comment linking /
on “The Cloud Is Not for You”Submitted Comparing NoSQL Availability Models as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThere was a great blog post the other week that explained the multi-tenancy stuff really well: http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2011/03/understanding-and-using-... Somewhere there's an HN discussion for it too.
Comment linking /2011/03/understanding-and-using-amazon-ebs.html
on “Introducing Druid: Real-Time Analytics at a Billion Rows Per Second”Submitted I come to use clouds, not to build them as a story · 8 points
HN discussionGreat test. I wonder if concurrent db access(submit db reads to multiple db servers and pick the first one) would enable workaround these weird variations in EBS response times. Adrian C from netflix had a nice tech article on EBS performance. "Understanding and using Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store" http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2011/03/understanding-and-using-...
Comment linking /2011/03/understanding-and-using-amazon-ebs.html
on “Greplin (YC W10) AWS Benchmarks and Best Practices”Submitted Ops, DevOps and NoOps at Netflix as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI suppose this became newsworthy on the heels of such posts as http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2011/03/understanding-and-using-... and much corporate blogging over the past few months about their migration to AWS.
Comment linking /2011/03/understanding-and-using-amazon-ebs.html
on “Netflix website and ability to instantly watch movies both unavailable.”Submitted It's not obvious how to be insanely simple as a story · 6 points
HN discussionHere is his own blog, maybe more interesting to read: http://perfcap.blogspot.com/
Comment linking /
on “Netflix Loses Its Cloud Guru to a VC Firm”Submitted How Netflix gets out of the way of innovation as a story · 5 points
HN discussionPlainly they're not immune to _all_ failures; I think you've made a parsing error there. http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/04/lessons-netflix-learned-... http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/cloud/2012/03/18/netflix-how-we-... http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2012/01/thoughts-on-simpledb-dyn... There's also all the "soft" statements they made; I'll let you search for them yourself.
Comment linking /2012/01/thoughts-on-simpledb-dynamodb-and.html
on “Netflix is down”Submitted The economics of Nissan Leaf ownership as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAdrian Cockcroft updated his blog post, which inspired this TechCrunch article, and clarified that he was not in fact referring to HTML5 video, as the TechCrunch article (currently) states. "MG Siegler at TechCrunch decided that I was talking about streaming video and Silverlight, which I wasn't. I was thinking of HTML5 features that let us build very cool user interfaces with drag-and-drop, canvas transforms etc. f…
Comment linking /2010/05/netflix-in-cloud-and-html5.html
on “Netflix Is The Latest To Talk The HTML5 Talk”Submitted Thoughts on DynamoDB From a Netflix Engineer as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWhy link to readwriteweb instead of the real comparison? http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2010/10/comparing-nosql-availabi...
Comment linking /2010/10/comparing-nosql-availability-models.html
on “NoSQL: Comparing the Different Solutions”Submitted How not to build a private cloud as a story · 3 points
HN discussionCorrect URL: http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2012/01/thoughts-on-simpledb-dyn...
Comment linking /2012/01/thoughts-on-simpledb-dynamodb-and.html
on “Thoughts on SimpleDB, DynamoDB and Cassandra”Submitted Netflix Culture as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Adrian Cockcroft: Looking back at 2013, with pointers to 2014 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Free Communication is Disrupting Hierarchies as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Are we ready for spotcloud yet? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
