USENIX Blog

The second Papers and Reports session on Thursday morning, chaired by Andrew Hume, focused on education and training. The first to present was Rudy Gevaert from Ghent University. In his talk, entitled "A sustainable model for ICT capacity building in developing countries", Rudy discussed lessons learned over nearly a decade of bringing information and communication technology (ICT) skills and resources to developing nations. The Flemish Inter-University Council for University Development Cooperation (VLIR-UOS) has been working partner universities in Cuba and Ethiopia.

Friday morning at LISA, people are tired but sessions still go on. Engineers from Engadget gave a presentation on how they survive Apple product announcements. It’s a very hard problem. The 4.4 billion requests during the two hour announcement is more than most of AOL’s sites get in a week.

There are a few methods for how they survive, but the single biggest is to build caching into every layer and avoid cache-busters. They’ve done so well at this that a single MySQL server per datacenter is enough to feed the thundering hordes.

Core Skills: Scripting for Automation was taught by Mike Ciavrella, a 12-year LISA veteran.

He created this class as a response to so many people he encountered who were automating because they knew it was a "best practice", and that they should "automate everything". Mike found that people didn't think about why they were automating, and he knew that was as important as actually doing the automation.

Wednesday at 2pm Sage Weil spent an hour+ talking about Ceph, the distributed storage system. This is the first time I’ve had a serious look at it, and this was one informative session. The Ceph project’s goals are to provide a pure open-source storage framework that can run on anything,