Sessions at Open Source Bridge 2009 about Web Hosting

Wednesday 17th June 2009

• Open Source Tools for Freelancers

  by Christie Koehler Ⓥ

  After nearly two years of full-time freelancing, I have learned a lot about maintaining my own website, making backups, managing version control, keeping track of time spent on projects, and invoicing tools. Come to this session where I will share much of what I've learned and present open source tools I have found essential for successful freelancing.

  Topics covered:

  • How to choose among shared/virtual/dedicated/cloud hosting options.
  • Simple, effective options for making regular, local and off-site backups.
  • Painless ways to utilize version control.
  • Simple time-tracking and invoicing tools.
  • Backups
  • software freelancing
  • Version Control
  • Web Hosting

  At 11:20am to 12:05pm, Wednesday 17th June

  Coverage note

• Layers of Caching: Key to scaling your website

  by Narayan Newton and Lance Albertson

  Caching is essentially a way of keeping the most used parts of a website in memory so that it gets served quickly. This will reduce CPU and I/O overhead and thus make the site very fast. Unfortunately this doesn't happen magically without some extra work.

  This talk will cover the several layers that you should know about how they improve the sites speed. Some of these will include:

  • "Squid":http://www.squid-cache.org/ / "mod_cache":http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/caching.html (disk backed caching)
  • "memcached":http://www.danga.com/memcached/
  • "APC":http://us.php.net/apc & other opcode caching
  • Application level caching
  • Configuring Apache properly
  • Solutions for python & ruby

  I will also go over how we utilize caching on the Drupal infrastructure which is hosted at the OSL along with other real world examples.

  • apc
  • Caching
  • Memcached
  • Performance
  • Web Hosting

  At 1:45pm to 2:30pm, Wednesday 17th June

  Coverage note

• Bridging the Developer and the Datacenter

  by Thomas Brenneke

  Your application is live and is now publicly accessible. You and your team have spent countless hours devouring your code base for the slightest imperfections, bugs and potential issues that may arise in production.

  We put an enormous amount of faith in our service providers / Datacenters to keep the bandwidth, power, servers, backups, and all other components of the hosting fabric online and operational.

  We will explore the aspects of hosting facilities which physically power your applications. Knowledge in these areas can strengthen your awareness when making purchasing decisions, or debugging critical components between the application and the hosting provider.

  _Key topics of discussion:_

  *Bandwidth*
  * How failure can occur when your data is in transit.
  * Redundancy methods actively in use today.
  * Quantifying usage and requirements for your application.
  * Understanding the terms and technologies used by hosting providers.

  *Backups*
  * Technologies for archiving and verifying the integrity of your data.
  * Web host or developer, who is responsible?
  * Understanding how and where data is stored.
  * Data restoration and retrieval.

  *Power*
  * Why it is the most critical component of the hosting model.
  * Basics of power redundancy.
  * Questions to ask your hosting provider.

  *Servers*
  * Measuring CPU, Memory and Disk I/O requirements.
  * Horizontal / Vertical Scaling.
  * Redundancies, and where failure most often occurs.

  *Virtualization*
  * When virtualization is, and is not appropriate.
  * Virtual Private Servers.

  This discussion will conclude with an open forum for QA on topics discussed, and any other relevant topics the attending audience might have.

  • bandwidth
  • Data Center
  • Scaling
  • Virtualization
  • Web Hosting

  At 3:50pm to 4:35pm, Wednesday 17th June

  Coverage note