2009 LISA Conference
I spent last week at the LISA Conference in Baltimore MD. if you aren’t familiar with LISA, it is a conference focused on system administration. This is the 4th LISA I’ve attended in the last 12 years.
On Monday I attended a tutorial by Richard Elling on ZFS: A Filesystem for Modern Hardware.
On Tuesday I attended two tutorials. The first was Jacob Farmer’s Disk-to-Disk Backup and Eliminating Backup System Bottlenecks. The second was Tom Limoncelli’s Design Patterns for System Administrators.
Unfortunately on both Monday and Tuesday I had to spend a significant amount of time on conference calls helping to troubleshoot some work related issues, but the time I spent in all 3 sessions and viewing their materials was helpful. I would definitely recommend attending tutorials by any of the 3 people above if they are teaching a topic of interest to you.
On Tuesday night I attended some (Open)Solaris birds-of-a-feather sessions. There were a few times that people in the crowd were being belligerent towards a speaker (mostly complaining about the difficulty of finding information of various types), even though the speaker certainly had no sway over what the person in the crowd was upset about. I don’t care how much money your company spends with a vendor, there is never a reason to be rude. David Miner gave a talk about whats coming in Solaris.next and Ben Rockwood gave an entertaining and informative presentation on ZFS in the Trenches.
I was lucky enough to get a chance to talk with David Miner over a quick lunch later in the week and talk about the new opportunities and challenges with the OpenSolaris installation technologies.
On Wednesday through Friday I attended a mix of presentations, met with a bunch of vendors, and also sat in some of the ‘Guru is in’ sessions and talked with a number of conference attendees. The highlights for me were:
- Werner Vogel (CTO of Amazon) gave a fascinating talk on the history of Amazon’s IT philosophy and infrastructure and how they evolved from a humble internal IT shop to adding a business which is the dominant cloud computing provider.
- Elizabeth Zwicky’s talk on “Searching for Truth, or at Least Data: How to Be an Empiricist Skeptic”
- Bryan Cantrill’s talk on “Visualizing DTrace: Sun Storage 7000 Analytics”
- Talking with the folks from Splunk (awesome log searching analysis tool)