"I keep coming back for the technical content and the personal networking opportunities. I attend for career development."
LISA '13 Attendee
"I use LISA to benchmark the SA activities in my company."
LISA '13 Attendee
"LISA is the place where industry best practices and cutting-edge research come together to advance system administration."
Nicole Forsgren Velasquez, Utah State University
"LISA is the conference that I send my system administrators to so they can bring the latest tools and techniques back to the rest of the team. Much of our current environment can be traced directly back to LISA."
Cory Lueninghoener, Deputy Group Leader of Production High Performance Computing at Los Alamos National Laboratory
"LISA is where professionals share what's hot in designing, building, and maintaining critical systems."
Tom Limoncelli, author, speaker, and system administrator
"LISA is where professionals share what's hot in designing, building, and maintaining critical systems."
Tom Limoncelli, author, speaker, and system administrator
"LISA is where I find direction for evolving the my core professional skills."
LISA '13 Attendee
"LISA is the conference that I send my system administrators to so they can bring the latest tools and techniques back to the rest of the team. Much of our current environment can be traced directly back to LISA."
Cory Lueninghoener, Deputy Group Leader of Production High Performance Computing at Los Alamos National Laboratory
"Information from LISA helps us push the envelope on automation and scaling, allowing a team of four to manage over 3000 Firefox build and test systems running 15 different operating systems."
Amy Rich, Manager of Release Engineering Operations at Mozilla
LISA: Where systems engineering and operations professionals share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world.
The LISA conference has long served as the annual vendor-neutral meeting place for the wider system administration community. The LISA14 program recognized the overlap and differences between traditional and modern IT operations and engineering, and developed a highly-curated program around 5 key topics: Systems Engineering, Security, Culture, DevOps, and Monitoring/Metrics. The program included 22 half- and full-day training sessions; 10 workshops; and a conference program consisting of 50 invited talks, panels, refereed paper presentations, and mini-tutorials.
Most system administrators are already familiar with diagnosing and tuning computer systems using performance data captured by open source or commercial monitoring tools such as Splunk, Graphite, and BMC Patrol.
This full-day tutorial will show you how to get beyond performance monitoring to performance analysis and capacity planning. These skills are in demand more than ever for sizing (over-engineering can't improve single-threaded performance), procurement (try buying a 10GHz processor), as well as ensuring scalability of large infrastructures used in both private and public clouds.
Since computer hardware has become a mass-produced commodity, its cost no longer drives capacity planning in the strategic sense. The capacity part has become cheap and easy; it's the planning part that requires skill. And capacity planning is not just about the future anymore. Rather, it needs to respond rapidly to the fast-paced changes and tighter budgets of modern business environments. Enter tactical planning: Guerrilla-style capacity planning.
Who should attend:
Anyone looking for job security by improving their skill set to include capacity management. No specialized background in performance analysis or capacity planning is assumed. A working knowledge of Linux or Unix performance tools will be helpful.
Take back to work:
The ability to start analyzing performance data you may already have collected to forecast system capacity and predict bottlenecks that can hinder system scalability.
Topics include:
What is performance and capacity management?
The Guerrilla approach to capacity planning.
Monitoring the volatile technology marketplace for procurement.
The three performance metrics you need to know.
Who ordered multicores and what are their performance limitations?
Statistical forecasting with R.
How to establish a capacity line.
Queueing analysis for those who can’t wait.
How to use PDQ for bottleneck analysis in R, C, Perl, and Python.
Quantifying scalability using Amdahl's law and the Universal Scalability Law.
Virtualization capacity management from core hyperthreads to cloud hyperservices.
Scalability analysis of Xen, VMware and WebLogic virtualized servers.
Case studies in capacity planning for large-scale web sites and multi-tier applications.
