Scalability, I Has It

On Monday I spoke at the Highload++ conference in Moscow, Russia. This is an annual conference put on by several local Russian tech folk that focuses on large scale website architectures. This conference covers the full stack, which includes database, which includes Postgres, which is where I get included in all of this. I gave a talk with a rather generic title, “Scaling with Postgres”, which incorporates both some thoughts on “tech culture” within organizations trying to scale Postgres (gleaned from years of working with these types of clients at OmniTI, plus quite a bit of mind-melding and discussion a few weeks ago at Surge conference), mixed in with some hands on pointers for those trying to do it with Postgres. I’ve put slides up on slideshare for those that want to view it, and I believe the Highload folks will have video up at some point. Along side my talk were talks from fellow Postgres contributors Simon Riggs and Bruce Momjian, which focused on performance, upgrading, and replication. I thought all of the talks were good, although given some overlap in Simon and Bruce’s talks, I think it would have been cool to cut the talks time and maybe have a short panel for open Postgres Q&A for all three of us. (This is likely difficult from a practical perspective, given the need for translations, but it seems doable). Instead, since Simon went first, he ended up taking the brunt of people’s questions; which was amusing for Bruce and me, but I think a panel would have been good. Maybe next time. Anyway, I want to thank the folks running Highload for inviting me to speak, and working through the travel shenanigans. I found the conference very nicely run, and the growth they are getting in attendance is a good sign for the Russian tech community! PS, someone at the conference had asked me about getting reconnoiter support; since I couldn’t get a card, I’ll just toss a link out here for him, or anyone else interested: http://labs.omniti.com/labs/reconnoiter/wiki/Support