January #lspe Meeting

I decided to give public speaking a go by presenting at the January meeting for Large Scale Production Engineering (#lspe). The evening's topics were on Load Balancers, and my presentation was on using anycast as a load balancing solution, without the need for load balancers.

nginx and Linux-HA
To kick off the meeting, Greg Lindahl gave a short presentation on using nginx and Linux-HA for the search engine Blekko, where he is CTO.

Greg Lindahl details nginx and Linux-HA use at Blekko

Software Offering in the Cloud
Raja Srnivasan, Director of Cloud Solutions from the Stingray Business Unit at Riverbed, presented on the current state and future of load balancing within the cloud. For those not familiar, Zeus was purchased by Riverbed, and this is the current software load balancer product. Click here to view the slides.

Anycast
I was up next, with Service Redundancy and Traffic Balancing Using Anycast. The discussion was how to leverage routing infrastructure to provide service-level redundancy without the need for load balancers. Thank you to Bill H., for taking a photo of me during the presentation.

Detailing routing protocol configuration on Linux hosts

Layer 2 Load Balancing in a Layer 3 World
Carl Stanley, Load Balancer Architect at Yahoo!, talked about how to extend inline and DSR load balancing beyond a router hop. This is useful because SNAT hides client address information, adds transaction latency and requires load balancers to process all service traffic. L3DSR kernel modules allow Linux and FreeBSD hosts to map DSCP bits to virtual services. This was a well-received discussion on extremely interesting technology. Slides available here.

Thanks
A huge thanks to Yahoo! for providing space and pizza for everyone. Thank you to Chris for allowing me to present and everyone for listening.