2023 Percona Live – Day 2

The final day of Percona Live started off with a keynote and a panel discussion.

As on the day before, Dave Stokes starting things off with some housekeeping notes.

After that he introduced Percona’s Chief Technical Officer and co-Founder, Vadim Tkachenko, who presented a roadmap for Percona’s products.

I am always interested in the customer angle for any product, so after Vadim finished he joined Michael Coburn, Principal Architect at Percona and Ernie Souhrada, who is a database engineer from Pinterest, for a “fireside chat”. Any discussion of a technical solution can be enriched by talking to end users, and Souhrada, as you might expect, was very bullish on Percona but was also able to tell us about some issues they encountered and how they were resolved.

After this opening presentation I spent my time in the sponsor showcase and talked to a number of people. While this conference is pretty specialized, people were enjoying it and seemed to be getting a lot out of the sessions.

In the afternoon I went to a second session by AWS, this one focused on troubleshooting issues with MySQL on Amazon RDS.

Jignesh Shah kicked it off by discussing some of the monitoring tools one gets with Amazon RDS, which include gathering metrics on the instance, the operating system and, of course, the database.

He then turned it over to Raluca Constantin, a database engineer who really knows her stuff.

She went over four different scenarios that she had encountered in the past with MySQL along with step by step instructions on how they were corrected.

The first scenario involved a problem with upgrading from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8. In some cases the table names for some system tables would have case differences. This would cause upgrades to hang.

The easiest fix was to run a query before the upgrade to see if these changes existed and if so the table names could be modified in the existing database to make sure the upgrade didn’t fail. However, the first attempt took over nine minutes to complete, and Raluca went through the logic of improving the query until it ran in seconds.

The second scenario involved detecting locks. Locks occur when the database is executing an action that requires exclusive access to, say, a table. If that action takes a long time, performance of the database can degrade. There are tools, such as Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), that can detect when this happens, and she also showed how one can modify some system parameters so that actions that cause locks will fail if they exceed a specified timeout.

At this point I had to leave to meet some other AWS folks across town, which was disappointing since I really liked how Raluca was presenting these topics. I hope to be able to see her speak again in the near future.

While this was pretty much the end of my Percona Live experience, I did discover that there was another conference going on this week called Glue.

I was pretty certain I saw Matt Butcher from Fermyon in the hotel, but didn’t want to bother him. Fermyon’s technology is a topic for a future post.

By the time I got back to the Marriott later that night, all of the conference stuff had been cleaned up. Overall I was pretty pleased with the venue with the exception that it is in a generic business park and really didn’t show off what Denver has to offer.

It was a pretty intense week (and I had to get up early for my flight home) so I went to bed, but I’m happy I came. I got to see some friends and make some new ones, which is one of the best things about in-person conferences. That said I’m looking forward to being at home for a bit.

2023 Percona Live – Day 0

This week I am in Denver attending the Percona Live conference. As part of my job I tend to focus on relational databases, especially open source relational databases, and Percona Live has become the conference that focuses on that topic. This is my first time attending.

Back when I was mainly focused on monitoring, I would go to an open source monitoring conference in Nürnberg, Germany, organized by Netways. Netways, like Percona, is a software, consulting and support company based around open source solutions, and while both companies have their own products, they welcome other projects and companies in the same space to their conference. So far Percona Live has a similar vibe to OSMC (which is a good thing).

Like many conferences the first day is devoted to tutorials. Since I don’t work directly with databases I didn’t sign up for any, but I was able to register and get my badge.

I did meet up with Vicențiu Ciorbaru from the MariaDB Foundation, and we had a nice, long lunch at a nearby restaurant. I am a big MariaDB fan and it was great to see him again.

Unfortunately, just after that lunch I came down with a case of food poisoning. I’m not sure if it was from that local bar or from the breakfast I ate in the hotel lounge, but after I threw up my spleen I curled up into a ball and slept for 15 hours. Fortunately, I now do feel much better and I’m eager for the main conference to start.

SCaLE 20x – Day 3

The final day of SCaLE 20x was bittersweet, as I was eager to see more presentations but not ready for it to be over.

Dr. Kitty Yeung

The opening keynote was given by Dr. Kitty Yeung. Dr. Yeung is one of those amazing people who makes me feel completely inadequate. A graduate of Cambridge and Harvard, she has worked in fields as varied as fashion and quantum computing. She is also an artist, and most of her slides were ones she created herself.

She did also use a really cool graphic of world population that would make Tufte proud.

World Population Graphic

A lot of her current work centers on the intersection of technology and fashion. Now I am the least fashionable person alive. Seriously, when I’m not in front of customers I wear the same clothes every day: a black, heavy-weight pocket T-shirt and Levis blue jeans.

I have often thought if I ever did start another company one option would be to create modern tech for older people. Now some people may say that products from companies like Apple are easy to use, but as someone who is often around people in their 80s I know this isn’t true for them. There should be a market for very simple, but powerful, tools aimed at people in this age group. I keep thinking of the Yayagram machine I saw a few years ago as an example.

Dr. Yeung’s work on integrating tech and fashion could be a great interface for these products.

Shifting gears a bit, the next presentation I attended was by Don Marti on privacy.

Don Marti

While it is hard for an individual to balance privacy and convenience in today’s surveillance economy, there are some steps you can take to minimize what personal information you share. I take a number of steps to increase my privacy while on the Internet and this talk gave me a few more tools to use.

One of the things I love about SCaLE is that they usually have an amazing closing keynote. It is cool because you get to end the conference on a high note, and as a speaker it is always nice to have something to keep people from leaving early on the last day.

This year’s keynote was no exception and featured Ken Thompson, one of the founders of Unix and the creator of the Go programming language.

Before he spoke, Ilan Rabinovich gave some closing remarks reflecting on 20 years of SCaLE (which I learned started out as an umbrella conference for Southern California area Linux User Groups).

SCaLE Founders

You can see a much younger Ilan as well as the still very tall Gareth Greenaway in that picture from SCaLE 1x. As someone who as been working in open source for over two decades it just doesn’t feel that long to me, so it was cool to reflect on all that has happened.

Ken Thompson with a picture of him and his siblings

Two decades pales in comparison to the experience of Ken Thompson. He was hired by Bell Labs the year I was born.

He gave us some of the history of his time there and walked us through the creation of what was probably the ur-archive of digital music. In the before times, back when mp3 encoding came out and people worked in offices, some of us would bring in our compact disc collections, rip them and place them in a common archive. Ken’s project pre-dated mp3s and started out as a quest to collect all the Billboard hit songs from 1957. As someone with mild OCD issues, I felt seen when he talked about how that expanded to collecting all the songs (grin).

Of course, digital content isn’t useful unless you can access it, so he modified a Wurlitzer jukebox with a couple of iPads to provide a cool interface, and then, because he is awesome, he bought a refurbished player piano with a MIDI interface so you could trigger that from the same device.

So the best way to sum up Sunday at SCaLE is that you are a lazy bum compared to folks like Dr. Leung, Ilan and his team, and Ken Thompson, who apparently thinks about making a space shuttle out of discarded household appliances while you are watching re-runs of The Big Bang Theory.

(grin)

Hats off to the whole SCaLE team for another great conference, and I’m so happy that it was back in Pasadena. I am already looking forward to next year.

SCaLE 20x – Day 2

I got up fairly early on Saturday and went through my presentation one final time. When working on a new talk there is a point where the feeling I get when thinking about having to present it goes from anxiety to eagerness and that happened this morning, so I felt ready to go.

The conference started off with a keynote by Arun Gupta, who is a VP at Intel focused on open ecosystems.

Arun Gupta Keynote

His talk was about using open source cultural best practices within an organization, and he used specific examples of how that was being done at Intel. It was the first time I had seen the abbreviation “CW*2” which stands for that Zen quote about “Chop wood, carry water“. While that phrase has a lot of different meanings, when applied to open source it references the idea that as a member of an open source community one should not only just focus on the high profile aspects of the project but also the more mundane ones that actually keep the project alive.

After the keynote it was time for my presentation. I was originally scheduled to speak on Sunday morning but due to a conflict I got a spot on Saturday. I was grateful as I like to get my responsibilities out of the way so I can enjoy the rest of the weekend without worrying about them.

Me at the end of my presentation (image yoinked from Zoe Steinkamp’s LinkedIn feed)

I did a talk on open source business models and how things have changed in the past decade or so. My “hook” was to do the presentation in the format of an old school text adventure.

It was fun (and yes, there was a grue reference). It seemed to go over well with the audience and there were a number of great questions afterward.

With that over I decided to walk down the road to grab lunch when I ran into Gareth Greenaway. Gareth was one of the original organizers of SCaLE and it was cool to be able to catch up. He is currently doing some amazing things over at Salt.

SCaLE always has a wonderful hallway track and I also got to see John Willis. I had not seen him in years although we used to cross paths much more frequently and it was nice to be able to catch up. He is a co-author on a new book called “Investments Unlimited” which chronicles the DevOps journey of a financial institution.

I also had some time to wander around the Expo floor. I try to minimize the amount of swag I bring home but I’ve started to collect those little enamel pins that some people give out.

Enamel pins on my backpack

Tha AlmaLinux pin was given to me by the amazing benny Vasquez who was spreading the word about their project which helps fill in the gap left by the CentOS project migrating to CentOS Stream.

Me and benny Vasquez

This year I spent a lot more time in sessions than I normally do as they were just so good. Many times I found myself having to decide between three or more talks that occurred at the same time.

One that I didn’t want to miss was given by Zoe Steinkamp on using InfluxDB to monitor the health of plants.

Zoe Steinkamp

I spent much of my professional career in observability and monitoring so I have a soft spot for unique applications of the technology. Zoe uses sensors to feed information about humidity, sunlight, etc. from her houseplants into InfluxDB so that she can use that information to maintain them in the best of health. My spouse keeps koi and I do something similar to monitor water temperature.

The next presentation I attended was on the Fediverse. Now I have never been much of a social media person, and last year I deleted my Twitter account which left LinkedIn as my only mainstream service. I do have a Mastodon account and with the recent migration of a lot of people to the platform I do find it useful, although I don’t spend nearly as much time on it as I did Twitter. I think it has a lot of potential, however, and what it really needs is that killer app to make it easier to use.

Bob Murphy presents on the Fediverse

Bob Murphy did a great talk on how the Fediverse is not Mastodon, and he introduced me to a number of other services that use ActivityPub, which is the underlying protocol. For example, there are sites that focus on image as well as video sharing, not just microblogging. Speaking of blogging, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) announced that they acquired the makers of an ActivityPub plugin to bring the technology in-house and it seems like they plan to make it a core part of their app.

The final talk I attended was given by Michael Coté. I’ve known Coté for over two decades back when he lived in Texas and it was nice to see him again (he’s living over in Yurrip these days).

Coté on Developer Platforms

As usual, he provided some great insights on what he is calling “platform engineering” (think DevOps mashed up with SRE).

After the talks were over I met up with some friends for dinner. Now I am a fan of the television series The Big Bang Theory. It is set at Caltech which is located in Pasadena, and there is even a street named “The Big Bang Theory Way” (my picture of the street sign didn’t come out, unfortunately). During the weekend I kept hearing people talk about a place called “Lucky Baldwins”. I thought it was a joke since the character of Sheldon in the TV show makes a reference to the place in an episode called “The Irish Pub Formulation” but it turns out it exists.

Lucky Baldwins

We stopped there for a drink and ended up staying for dinner. It was a nice ending to a busy day.

SCaLE 20x – Day 1

I spent Friday morning practicing and working on my presentation, but managed to make it over to the conference just before lunch.

SCaLE 20x Sign

I was really impressed with the “steampunk” graphics for this year’s show. They were cool.

Check-in, as usual with SCaLE, was a breeze. They have automated most of it. You walk up to a bank of computers, choose one and then enter in your registration information and your badge gets printed. I also think you could purchase a registration through the system as well.

Then you walk down to a table to get your conference bag, badge holder and lanyard.

After wandering around for a bit I went down the street to meet up with Aaron Leung. While I love many things about being able to work remotely, I do miss meeting people in person and especially people I work with at AWS. Aaron happens to live in LA and he was kind enough to come out to see me and we had a great lunch.

Having SCaLE back in Pasadena was awesome. Not only is the convention center nice, it is really close to a ton of restaurants so you have a bunch of options for dining. The only downside was that it was raining (you can see the folks with the umbrellas above). When I had to go outside it wasn’t bad – more of a mist – and it was strange to have rain in LA. It did make the hills very green, however, and quite the departure from the usual tan.

After our long lunch I worked some more on my presentation, and then headed back over to the conference. The Expo floor was open so I spent some time wandering around and looking at the booths.

SCaLE Expo Floor

Toward the end of the afternoon I went to see Bryan Cantrill speak on his new company, Oxide Computer.

Bryan Cantrill and The Forgotten Operator

The “forgotten” operator in the title refers to people tasked with running on-premises data centers. Now I’ve been in a number of data centers and they were all has he described: racks upon racks of 1U and 2U servers arranged in rows, some with “hot” aisles and “cold” aisle and each server with a pair of power supplies and lots and lots of cabling.

I have never been inside a Google or Amazon data center, but I’ve always imagined it to be more along the lines of the one Javier Bardem’s character set up in Skyfall.

Picture of a data center from the James Bond film Skyfall.

In these days of the “cloud”, compute is divorced from storage and so a lot of the hardware in an old school 1U rack mount machine is unnecessary. Plus there is the antiquated idea of having separate power supplies for each board in the rack. Computers run on DC power, so why not just supply it directly from a central source vs. individually? I started my professional career working for phone companies and everything was DC (many central offices had a huge room in the basement with chemical batteries – and, yes, it did smell).

When I started my own company 20+ years ago I had two Supermicro 1U machines and when I turned them on they were each louder than a vacuum cleaner. Bryan told us that their racks are whisper-quiet (well, once they are powered on and the fans on the rectifiers spool down).

I’m oversimplifying, but that is the basic idea behind Oxide. They want to supply cloud-grade computing gear to enterprises and break the old paradigm of what a data center should look like. Users can still leverage cloud technologies like Kubernetes but on their own gear. It still doesn’t solve the need to have people who understand the technology on staff, but it was exciting in any case.

Friday evening featured a series of lightning talks called “Upscale”. It was hosted by Jason Hibbets and Hannah Anderson and sponsored by opensource.com.

Upscale Presenters and Participants

Lightning talks are 5 minute presentations consisting of a set number of slides that advance automatically. I’ve never given one, and once when I mentioned that I thought it was cool it was pointed out that I can’t introduce myself in five minutes, much less give a talk. (grin)


I was impressed with the presentations. One that stuck out was the fact that the term “open source” as formalized by the Open Source Initiative is now 25 years old. Wow.

After Upscale a group of us went down the street for dinner and drinks. I can’t emphasize enough about how much I miss the face-to-face aspect of in-person conferences and I hope we can continue to have them safely.

SCaLE 20x – Day 0

Today I left for Pasadena and the 20th iteration of the Southern California Linux Expo.

Me on a plane

SCaLE is on of my favorite events of the year, and I’ve been coming (for the most part) since SCaLE 5x.

This year I’m giving a presentation on open source business models, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

I didn’t get to attend any of the sessions or activities on the first day, but I did manage to have dinner with some friends including Ilan Rabinovich, who is one of the main organizers of the event, and Stephen Walli, who works on the open source team at Microsoft. I also got to meet for the first time Amye Scavarda Perrin who is a program manager at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Ilan, Stephen, myself and Amye

While I think virtual conferences have a lot to offer in the way of education, I really do miss these opportunities to meet face to face and to interact with interesting people. I’m hoping that in-person events become more common in 2023.

MariaDB Server Fest 2022

The thing I like most about my job is that I get to meet and work with amazing people. Recently I traveled to Helsinki, Finland, to attend the MariaDB Server Fest conference. It was a great experience and I met some very talented people, including Monty Widenius himself.

Note: The usual disclaimer that this is my personal blog and what I write here does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer, Amazon Web Services

My role at AWS is to work with open source companies and communities and to act as a liaison between them and Amazon. In thinking about important open source projects one of the first that comes to mind is MariaDB.

When I first got seriously involved in open source back in 2001, the MySQL database was an example of an open source success story. While a lot of the focus of the early days of open source was on the operating system, MySQL demonstrated that open source applications were powerful enough to compete with existing proprietary solutions. Plus, if you were building an open source application, quite often you needed a database, and MySQL provided a great option.

Many of us expected MySQL to IPO, but instead the company was bought by Sun Microsystems. That wasn’t too worrisome since Sun was a big proponent of open source, but when Sun was bought out by Oracle a couple of years later, that all changed.

On the day the acquisition was announced, Monty Widenius (the lead developer of MySQL) announced a fork of MySQL called MariaDB. In the years since then, a lot of people have replaced MySQL with MariaDB. While Oracle has continued to work on MySQL, the last major release, version 8.0, came out in April of 2018 so one must wonder how motivated they are to work on a product that competes with their main proprietary offering.

When I learned about Server Fest I decided to attend. As much as I like the ease of remote communication, sometimes nothing beats meeting face to face. I had also been to Helsinki a couple of time before and I really like the city, although I really should try to visit once in the summer time.

Boarding Sign for Flight to Helsinki

I flew from North Carolina to JFK and then took a Finnair flight to Finland. Helsinki is seven hours ahead of New York, so it is one of those weird trips where you leave in the night and land the following afternoon. When I travel I tend to stay at Marriott properties, but all the Marriott affiliated hotels were booked. I later learned that this was because a popular start-up conference called Slush was happening at the same time as Server Fest. Because of this there was no meeting space for rent, so the MariaDB event was being held at Monty’s house, which I thought was kind of cool.

Proposed schedule for Server Fest 2022

The conference was on Thursday, November 17th, and was going to be live-streamed on YouTube. In order to better match up with the time zone in New York, it started around 3pm and ran into the night. I arrived mid-morning.

When you walk into Monty’s house, the first thing you notice is that is has a very open floorplan. Directly across from the entryway is a huge table that can probably seat about 20 people, and that’s where most folks had set up their laptops. To the right of that was a large kitchen, and to the left was an open area where the walls were lined with bookcases, and that is where lights and cameras had been set up for the livestream.

Now MariaDB is organized in two parts. There is the MariaDB corporation, which is the main commercial enterprise behind the project, and there is the MariaDB Foundation, which manages project governance and promotion. Both were represented in the day’s presenters, and I also got to meet and spend a lot of time with Kaj Arnö, who is the CEO of the Foundation.

I also got to meet the true boss of the event, Anna Widenius, Monty’s wife. As you can imagine, getting a bunch of open source geeks organized is like herding cats, but she did a great job in getting the conference underway and keeping it moving.

The event kicked off with a presentation by Manuel Arostegui, who helps maintain the MariaDB infrastructure at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Manuel Arostegui Presenting

He talked about “Chasing Bugs in Production”. When Wikimedia upgraded from MariaDB 10.4 to 10.6 they ran into a performance issue. His talk describes their upgrade process and how they were able to work with MariaDB to get the issue addressed. I also found it interesting that they run MariaDB on bare metal. So much of today’s IT infrastructure is based on clouds and Kubernetes that it was refreshing to see someone taking advantage of individual servers when it makes sense.

There was a bit of a hiccup with the second speaker who was supposed to join remotely, so Monty Widenius moved his presentation on query optimization in MariaDB to the second slot.

Monty Widenius Presenting

There are several methods that can be used to execute a query against a database. A good database will optimize the query method to choose the best plan to return the result in fastest time. In MariaDB 11, Monty has changed the method to use a cost-based optimizer (versus rule-based) with parameters that can be tuned by the user. This has resulted in more efficient queries and thus a better user experience.

The third presentation was by Daniel Black who joined us via Zoom from Australia (where it was 1am the next day.

Daniel Black via Zoom with Kaj Arnö

His topic involved the community, and I really liked his comment that MariaDB is “dependent on its users to give MariaDB its purpose” which I thought was pretty insightful.

The next presentation was one of my favorite. It was on MindsDB and was presented by Jorge Torres.

Jorge Torres Presenting

MindsDB allows you to integrate machine learning easily into your database. In his example he used a model trained by Hugging Face to analyze text in order to detect “sentiment” – i.e. is the text positive, negative or neutral. And you access this using SQL queries.

For example, supposed you have a blog or other website where users can submit comments. MindsDB would allow you to examine those comments to detect general sentiment without having to learn an entirely new system. I thought it was pretty cool.

The fifth presentation was on “respecting the stack” or insuring continuity within MariaDB. This was lead by Soeren von Varchmin along with Kaj Arnö and Dom Taylor.

Soeren von Varchmin via Zoom with Kaj Arnö

This resonated with me as it focused on building the sponsorship community within MariaDB, for both individuals and entities. MariaDB is an important piece of technology and there are a lot of stakeholders, and this talk really reinforced the idea of a “big tent” environment within the project.

For the next presentation we finally got to hear from Federico Razzoli founder of Vettabase (he was originally scheduled to go second but there was some time zone confusion) as he talked about new MariaDB features to learn “for a happy life”.

Federico Razzoli via Zoom with Kaj Arnö

He started off with the comment that MariaDB (and open source projects in general) are very good at creating new features and not so good about documenting or advertising them. He discussed the most recent releases of MariaDB and then highlighted various new features that people should find useful.

The seventh presentation was by Sergey Petrunia and revisited the optimizer, but focused on changes made before Monty’s changes in MariaDB 11.

Sergey Petrunia Presenting

His talk focused on those changes made in the last year (i.e. since the last Server Fest) and it looks like a lot of progress was made to make the optimizer more consistent.

The following talk by Marko Mäkelä was on Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) and it went right over my head.

Marko Mäkelä Presenting

From what I can tell, the idea behind MVCC is that active databases are constantly processing transactions but there is a need to provide a consistent “view” at a given point in time, so MVCC determines which transactions are supposed to be considered committed at that point in time and which are not. This is to prevent someone who is reading from the database from being served incomplete information.

The final scheduled talk was by Andrew Hutchings who works to analyze contributions to the MariaDB project.

Andrew Hutchings Presenting

As transparency is key to any open source project, MariaDB publishes statistics on code contributions. The latest one I can find is through September of this year, and I was happy to see Amazon on the list of contributors to the MariaDB Server code.

Of course the majority of code commits, nearly 80% were done by the MariaDB corporation, and another 14% by the MariaDB Foundation. Amazon represented 1.42% of contributions, but Andrew pointed out to me that they came from 14 unique committers versus 8 from the Foundation. I’d love to see that involvement increase.

We did get a bonus talk by Andrei Elkin on the GTID-aware mariadb-binlog

Andrei Elkin Presenting

The mariadb-binlog is a binary log containing a record of all changes to the databases, both data and structure. There is a command line tool that lets you examine this log which now supports Global Transaction IDs, making it easier to filter transactions.

After the Server Fest stream was over, we got to my favorite part of any conference – the socializing.

I did spend some time talking with Manuel Arostegui. One of my friends, Eric Evans, works at the Wikimedia Foundation focused on Cassandra. It turns out that both Manuel and Eric are in the same department. Small world.

Manuel and Me

We eventually sat down to dinner prepared by the Widenius’s. Monty cooked a huge beef tenderloin, and we talked, sang songs and drank. I managed to get back to my hotel about 1am the next morning.

Usually when I travel home from Europe my flight will leave around noon and I get back in the early afternoon local time. For some reason those flights were over $1000 more than the Finnair flight that left at 5pm, so I returned to Monty’s on Friday morning to visit for a few hours.

I loved the fact that Monty was so welcoming and also that he and his family keep a lot of animals (we do the same). In addition to six cats and three dogs, there is a boa constrictor named Monty Python who is about two meters long. The story I heard was that it was a gift given to a family member that ended up at Monty’s. They originally thought it was a python but later learned it was a boa, but the name stuck.

Monty Python the Boa Constrictor

The trip home was uneventful except for the fact that I got home home close to 2am and I ended up catching a bad case of influenza. To my knowledge no one else at the conference got sick, for which I’m happy, and while it knocked me out of commission for almost two weeks it was worth it.

Remaining 2022 Conferences

Today marks my three month anniversary with AWS, and I’m loving it. It has been a lot of fun returning to conferences, so I thought I’d post a list of the ones I will be attending for the rest of the year.

If you are going to any of these as well, please reach out as I miss seeing people in person and would love to catch up (or, get acquainted).

2022 SCaLE 19x – Day Four

The last day of SCaLE was bittersweet, as I didn’t want it to be over but I was also ready to head home.

After stopping by the booth I was eager to visit a session on OpenNMS presented by my friend Jeff Gehlbach.

Jeff Gehlbach presenting on network flow data

Jeff has stepped up in the the presenter role I used to have, and he did a very good job of covering what network flows are, the different types and why they are important.

Back in the Exhibit Hall I was happy to learn that the AWS booth had won the “Most Memorable” award.

Most Memorable Booth Certificate

Hats off to Spot and Ashley for coming up with such a cool concept and creating a great space for people to hang out.

At 1:30pm we held a raffle for a pretty nice 3D printer. You had to be present to win and there was a lot of interest.

Spot surrounded by a crowd as the raffle winner is chosen

Then it was time to tear down the booth as the Exhibit Hall closed at 2pm.

This gave us time to get to the closing keynote by Internet pioneer Vint Cerf.

Vint Cerf in front of a podium

For someone who recently turned 79 he was a dynamic and entertaining speaker, and it was fun to listen to his stories on creating ARPANET, and how it grew into the public Internet we use today.

He also mentioned Jon Postel several times. I had an e-mail correspondence with Jon in the mid-1990s when I was trying to wrap my brain around the process for getting an “enterprise number” from IANA. I didn’t realize until after his untimely death who he was, and I’m still impressed at how much time he was willing to give a newbie like me.

While I enjoyed the presentation, I did regret that we ran out of time for details on his last slide, which concerned “unfinished business”.

Slide Listing Unfinished Business for the Internet

I mean, I get it. Each of the six topics on the slide could be a talk on its own, but I was very curious to hear his thoughts on fixing things such as disinformation. I love living in a world with almost instant access to information and the ability to connect with others, but there are problems, too, and I’m not sure we have the solutions.

All in all I am extremely happy to have been able to attend SCaLE. I’m still not comfortable in crowds and I was a little put out that not everyone in attendance decided to honor the mask policy. I talked with the SCaLE staff and they told me they were doing all they could, but even when people were reminded to mask up they tended to remove them as soon as the staff member walked away.

I was especially unhappy when I saw sponsors going maskless. On the one hand I am happy for their support of SCaLE, but on the other when you are standing in front of your company logo showing a disregard for the safety of your potential customers, it sends a bad message.

I’m not bringing this up to start a debate on the efficacy of masks, as I realize that they provide varying degrees of protection depending on type and use, but if your staff isn’t willing to abide by the conference rules, perhaps you just shouldn’t be there.

Note that I did refrain from posting the pictures I took of specific sponsors since it really wouldn’t change anything. I must be getting soft in my old age.

In any case I hope this is a non-issue for SCaLE 20x in Pasadena next March. I’m not optimistic that the pandemic will be over but for me the risk was worth the benefit, and I can’t wait to return.

2022 SCaLE 19x – Day Three

Day Three of SCaLE kicked off the start of the main conference, which meant I spent most of the day in the AWS booth.

AWS Booth Picture Showing a Television Screen Playing Frontalot Videos

Traffic was pretty good and I got to talk with a lot of interesting people. I did take a break around 2pm and noticed from Twitter that I was missing a talk by Frank Karlitschek of Nextcloud fame, so I skedaddled over to his room to catch it.

It was pretty good. It focused on how copyleft-style licenses are often better for business since they level the playing field for all contributors, versus a number of newer licenses that are more “source available” instead of “open source”.

Frank Karlitschek Presenting at SCaLE

Please note that I’m an unabashed Nextcloud fanboy so I have some biases. (grin)

The big evening event was “Game Night” where they turned the basement ballrooms into a big gaming playground. From the classics such as checkers and chess, to Vegas-style games such as roulette and blackjack, up to the most modern of games using VR, there was something for everyone.

AWS sponsored the music for the event, and I was eager to see MC Frontalot perform. He didn’t disappoint.

MC Frontalot Performing at SCaLE

He did an hour-long set spanning the classics to the newer stuff, including “Secrets From the Future” featuring a video generated using AI.

Afterward he hung out at the merch table to chat with folks, and I got to spend some time with a new friend named Silona Bonewald.

MC Frontalot and Silona Bonewald

I was introduced to Silona through Spot as she was on the same hotel shuttle bus when we arrived on Wednesday evening. She is in charge of open source at IEEE as well as being a Burner, and I always look forward to chance to talk with her.

Today is the final day of the conference, and remember if you are reading this before 1:30pm PDT there is a raffle for an awesome 3D printer at the AWS booth, so come by to get your ticket.