ApacheConNA: Misc # In his talk on Spdy Mathew Steele explained how he implemented the spdy protocol as an Apache httpd module - working around most of the safety measures and design decisions in the current httpd version. Essentially to get httpd to support the protocol all you need now is mod_spdy plus a modified version of mod_ssl. The keynote on the last day was given by the Puppet founder. ...
ApacheConNA: Hadoop metrics # Have you ever measured the general behaviour of your Hadoop jobs? Have you sized your cluster accordingly? Do you know whether your work load really is IO bound or CPU bound? Legend has it noone expecpt Allen Wittenauer over at Linked.In, formerly Y! ever did this analysis for his clusters. Steve Watt gave a pitch for actually going out into your datacenter measuring what is going on there and adjusting the deployment accordingly: In small ...
ApacheConNA: Monitoring httpd and Tomcat # Monitoring - a task generally neglected - or over done - during development. But still vital enough to wake up people from well earned sleep at night when done wrong. Rainer Jung provided some valuable insights on how to monitor Apache httpd and Tomcat. Of course failure detection, alarms and notifications are all part of good monitoring. However so is avoidance of false positives and metric collection, ...
ApacheConNA: On Security # During the security talk at Apache Con a topic commonly glossed over by developers was covered in quite some detail: With software being developed that is being deployed rather widely online (over 50% of all websites are powered by the Apache webserver) natually security issues are of large concern. Currently there are eight trustworthy people on the foundation-wide security response team, subscribed to security@apache.org. The team was started by ...
ApacheConNA: On documentation # In her talk on documentation on OSS Noirin gave a great wrap up of the topic of what documentation to create for a project and how to go about that task. One way to think about documentation is to keep in mind that it fulfills different tasks: There is conceptual, procedural and task-reference documentation. When starting to analyse your docs you may first want to debug ...
ApacheConNA: On delegation # In her talk on delegation Deb Nicholson touched upon a really important topic in OSS: Your project may live longer than you are willing to support it yourself. The first important point about delegation is to delegate - and to not wait until you have to do it. Soon you will realise that mentoring and delegation actually is a way to multiply your resources. In order to delegate people to delegate to are needed. ...
ApacheConNA: First keynote # All three ApacheCon keynotes were focussed around the general theme of open source communities. The first on given by Theo had very good advise to the engineer not only striving to work on open source software but become an excellent software developer: Be loyal to the problem instead of to the code: You shouldn't be addicted to any particular programming language or framework and refuse to work ...
ApacheConNA: Meet the indian tribe # ApacheCon is the ``User Conference of the Apache Software Foundation’’. What should that mean? If you are going to Apache Con you have the chance of meeting committers of your favourite projects as well as members of the foundation itself. Though there are a lot of talks that are interesting from a technical point of view the goal really is to turn you into an active member of the ...
ApacheConEU - part 11 (last part) # One of the last sessions covered logging frameworks for Java. Christian Grobmeier started by detailing the common requirements for all logging frameworks: Speed - developers do not want to pay a disproportional penalty for using a logging framework. Fail-safety and reliability - under no circumstances should your logging framework kill your application. In addition it would be most annoying to find that one log message that would help you de-cypher the problem your application ran into missing. ...
ApacheConEU - part 10 # In the next session Jukka introduced Tika - a toolkit for parsing content from files including a heuristics based component for guessing the file type: Based on file extension, magic and certain patterns in the file the file type can be guessed rather reliably. Some anecdotes: not all mime types are registered with IANA, there are of course conflicting file extensions, Microsoft Word not only localises their interface but also the magic in the file, ...