"LISA is where professionals share what's hot in designing, building, and maintaining critical systems."
Tom Limoncelli, author, speaker, and system administrator
"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 where I find direction for evolving the my core professional skills."
LISA '13 Attendee
"I use LISA to benchmark the SA activities in my company."
LISA '13 Attendee
"I keep coming back for the technical content and the personal networking opportunities. I attend for career development."
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 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: 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.
Truly large-scale systems are still rare, and in a world of out-sourcing, and cloud-computing, it's harder for System Administrators to get the opportunity to design large systems. It's even harder to get the design right. Most organizations don't have the in-house expertise to build a large system, so outsource the detailed design to external contractors. If your organization doesn't have the expertise to design a large system, it's unlikely that it has the expertise to confirm a proposal is fit for your purposes and is cost effective.
While anyone can wave their hands convincingly, and come up with a rough outline of a large distributed system, those who can also fill in the detail are highly-prized. This class will teach you how to design software systems like Imgur and Twitter, then estimate the hardware needed to ensure you can deliver to a hard SLA. You will learn how requirements like queries-per-second, multi-site reliability, and data security impact the cost of implementation.
This will *not* cover concurrent programming and the software-engineering side of distributed systems.
Who should attend:
System Admins who want to understand large systems, System Engineers who want to build large systems and business people who expect to procure large systems.
Take back to work:
An ability to assess whether a design will work before it's built. The ability to communicate large system design with systems architects and business people. An ability to assess requirements, communicate constraints and predict performance of large systems before money is spent.
