iControl

Taco Tuesday with Jason Hoffman, Joyent CTO

Colin Walker — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:09:39 GMT

So it looks like Joe and I are going to have to take a trip down to San Fran to check out Nick's Crispy Tacos with Jason Hoffman, CTO and co-founder of Joyent. Jason puts on a "Taco Tuesday" on the third Tuesday of just about every month. We've been invited down to check it out and geek out over the hawesome iRules/iControl/Ruby/*Nix/geeky stuff they're doing. Yeah...I'm not completely geeking out and excited, honest. Don't worry though, we'll try to make the best of it.

We got a fantastic opportunity today to talk with Jason about Joyent, what they're doing, their architecture, their background, etc. and how they're heavily leveraging F5 technology to make it all happen. For those of you that don't know, Joyent is a long-time F5 customer that provides a wickedly cool, scalable, flexible cloud infrastructure to users ranging anywhere from the Mom and Pop size to truly robust Enterprise level applications. You may have seen Joe's blog post about Joyent hosting LinkedIn's BumperSticker Facebook app that recently surpassed a billion page views per month. That spurred an offer to chat, and Jason was more than happy to oblige.

It was absolutely fantastic to talk to Jason who himself is an avid engineer that's got a long history with Unix and many of the flavors of coding that go along with it. As one of the first major adopters of Ruby and, in fact, the very first person to check in source to the Rails source control system, he definitely knows what he's talking about when it comes to *Nix programming, Ruby, and RoR. It turns out we even share a common love for and history with FreeBSD, go figure.

Over the course of our discussion we got to chat with Jason about his role at Joyent, what they're delivering to users, why it's unique and powerful, obstacles they faced along they way, how they got around them which, I'm happy to say, largely included F5 technology and specifically iRules and iControl, and many other such things impressively full of win. From many of their security policies relying on iRules instead of FireWalls, to iControl being an integral part of their provisioning system, to building iRules as solutions to countless customer problems or requirements, these guys are definitely power users and avid DevCentral members, I'm happy to say.

We also got to talk about the modern application, how it's architected, how the old school ways of thinking don't apply anymore and the massive benefits that can come from allowing yourself to see the possibilities with a modern, flexible, layered architecture. This architecture with powerful caches, application aware network devices serving large portions of the application functionality, and scalable, interchangeable back ends thanks to the load balancing that also occurs at that tier is hugely powerful and really more and more of a "must have" as things continue to progress in the application and application delivery world. Pretty darn cool stuff to hear from a PhD helping to run a hugely popular and successful hosting company. How's that for real world application?

This is the exact message I (we) have been pushing for a long time. Every time I talk about "preaching the good word", this is what I'm talking about. Times have changed, technology has improved, and F5 can be a big part of building a powerful, flexible, scalable, reliable architecture if you just let yourself think about things in the new, more modern world that Jason and Joyent have fully embraced. It's allowing them to be as powerful and usable as they are at extremely reasonable costs with incredible scalability as needed.

Check out the podcast to get more of the details. Obviously I'm excited, and am currently trying to refrain from a big squeeeee of geekitude, but that's just how I get when I get to riff about awesome technology with even more awesome people.

Stay tuned for the follow up where Joe and I tear into some tacos, margaritas and hopefully some iControl/Ruby/iRules with Jason down in his neck of the woods. Not that it's been approved yet or anything, but hey, I can hope, right?

Thanks again Jason for the great chat, and keep up the killer work.

Technorati Tags: DevCentral,iRules,iControl,Ruby,iContRuby,LinkedIn,FaceBook,BumperSticker,Joyent,Jason Hoffman,Colin Walker

#Colin

Spreading The Good Word: Ch3 - Final Chapter

Colin Walker — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 17:15:54 GMT

For the third leg of my whirlwind tour (3rd? 4th? nobody's counting...) I find myself in Finland to meet with a group of eager to iRule F5 users. Thanks to their excitement about iRules, iControl and DevCentral - not to mention the great efforts of the local team to round up said eager users - we had a fantastic turnout. I believe when the dust settled we had 19 people attending the somewhat impromptu chat.

While people started the day out largely timid, friendly banter and good 'ole geeky discussion was the order of the day before we were finished. It was great, yet again, to get a chance to chat about some of the technologies I love with a group of people that seemed honestly interested in learning more, making better use of what they know, or really pushing the limits of the technology.

There were great questions, a few witty comments, and - I believe - a good time had by all. We got a chance to continue our discussions over a nice lunch facilitated by the wonderfully helpful and friendly local SEs (Thanks again guys!). Unfortunately I was pulled away all too early as the next meeting of the day called.

After a fantastic 3 hour discussion with some customers, I found myself back on a plane, winging my way back to London to grab a few winks of sleep before my flight headed back stateside the next morning.

As my trip comes to a close, I'm quite pleased to say that every single event, meeting, user group and chat that I've attended during my time across the pond has been nothing short of fantastic. I want to extend a personal thanks to all of the participants and attendees. In case any of you are reading this (I told you I'd be blogging about you...), thank you all very much for making this trip a great success, and quite enjoyable all at once.

There should be some good content - a couple of videos and a Tech Tip or two at least - coming in the next week or so, so make sure to stay tuned, as I'll definitely call them out and give some more background on each when they show up on DevCentral.

#Colin

What do YOU need to get over that coding hurdle?

Colin Walker — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 19:37:08 GMT

As a developer, and one that works with iRules on a daily (hourly?) basis,it's often easy to overlook certain steps of the process people take when investigating a technology like this. I've recently spoken with a few different people, some on our team, some community members here at DevCentral, some part of the gray masses not falling directly into either of those categories, about iRules in different capacities. It seems that once people get over the initial hurdle of figuring out what iRules

APIs all around...

Colin Walker — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 20:14:00 GMT

So I'm browsing Channel9, and I see a video that hits close to home, in the best of ways. Microsoft Messanger has an API? It will. And let me tell you, it sure sounds cool. I know what you're thinking, it was my first thought too..."But what would I do with an API on a messenger program?". Well, read on (or better yet, go see the video) to find out.

In line translation, third party "bots" performing monitoring, logging, even information transformation all in line between users. Custom scripts built to your design to do any number of things.

Imagine chatting with your friend, and not having to log the transcript to your blog, because it's done for you. Or talking with someone in Germany with no language barrier. These are just a few of the examples given in the video that caught my attention...the possibilities are nearly limitless.

It sounds like these guys are doing some great things, and changing the way people look at, and use, the messaging market.

-Colin

Listening to - Morphine, The Night