Group 42

In a presentation at the September 2009 meeting of the Vancouver League of Drupaliers (Vancouver's Drupal user group) core Drupal Developer and Now Public Development Team Lead Károly "CHX" Négyesi spoke about the importance of APIs in Drupal 7. If you're serious about scalability APIs are no longer an optional convenience. For some this may not be an issue, for others this could be a mindset change. Károly also discussed some other Drupal 7 improvements like functional testing.

This is a video of his presentation.

Drupal 7 APIs: A Mindset Change for Scalability

This video can also be viewed directly at: Drupal 7 APIs: A Mindset Change for Scalability

The Vancouver League of Drupalers June 2007 meeting topic was Amazon Web Services, of which S3 is arguably the best know. It was given by Alex Harford (pictured right, photo by Roland). We heard about him and his Amazon knowledge though the local Linux community. He graciously accepted our invitation to speak.

Alex's presentation slides, available at http://www.alexharford.com/2007/06/28/drupal-presentation/, are quite good. If you're interested and want an overview of the services I encourage you to browse them.

Some things I learned:

• The simple storage service, S3, is very straight forward. It has an option to serve your file by bittorret and is scriptable.
• The SQS: Simple Queue Service was interesting but I wasn't sure why I'd want to use it until I understood what EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud was.
• EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud is a virtual private server (VPS) service you can rent by the hour. Firing up new instances is a menu click and is scriptable. (Hmmm, need a new build server but only for a couple hours …..)
• The Mechanical Turk service seemed gimmicky but the idea hamster for one of the attending Drupaler's went into overdrive.
• There are web and Linux clients for handling files, so no programming is required to get something basic going

Even though I have no current requirement for Amazon Web Services I wish I did. I'd love an excuse to play with them!

April 26, 2007 saw a close encounter of the Drupal kind at the Bryght offices in Vancouver's Gastown. Attendance wasn't counted but people were scrambling for chairs. Meeting topics included:

• OSCMS Roundup
• Drupal 6 Update
• Scott Hadfield's Summer of Code Project on Drupal Scalability
• Install Profiles
• Pro Drupal Development Book
• General Q&A

What follows are my notes from the meeting, including audio excerpts (Recording credits go to Roland Tanglao and myself).

One thing about the Vancouver Drupalier meetings, I'm never quite sure what to expect. Last night's meeting was the least technical so far and a lot of fun. Here are some notes with stuff left out to protect both the innocent and the guilty . . . . .

At the September CIPS Security Special Interest Group meeting Robert Hawk spoke on patch management. A lot of what Robert had to say was pure project management and governance principals applied to the security domain. The value of Robert

The next meeting of the Vancouver Python/Zope Users Group is:

Sadly, I have a class that night. Paul always has interesting things to say and based on what I saw at the Python Workshop so does Dethe Elza.

Richard Erikson posted a great set of notes from the August Drupal meetup: Notes from August 24th Vancouver Drupal User's Group.

The next Vancouver Drupal meeting is scheduled for Thursday September 28th at 6:30pm. Information at groups.drupal.org/vancouver. If all goes to plan we'll get a report on DrupalCon Brussels. Wish I could be there! I remember how much work got done and how much fun the Vancouver conference was. Looking forward to hearing the latest plans and thoughts on things Drupal.

The follow notes are part 2 of 3 from Narayanan 'Shiva' Shivakumar's presentation at the July 27th VanHPC meeting. These notes cover Shivakumar's discussion of the Google software infrastructure.

The following notes are part 1 of 3 from Narayanan 'Shiva' Shivakumar's presentation at the July 27th VanHPC meeting. These notes cover Shivakumar's discussion of the Google hardware infrastructure.

Last Thursday (July 27th) I attended the VanHPC meeting with speaker Narayanan 'Shiva' Shivakumar, founding director of Google's Seattle-Kirkland R&D Center. He's a very good speaker with a wry sense of humour and was extremely generous about answering questions. His talk, while interesting, didn't have quite the depth I had hoped for.

Shivakumar started the talk with some interesting pictures of the early Google. The PC motherboards sitting on cardboard in 19-inch racks was quite a site! The prize for the best phrased question of the evening goes to the person who prefaced his question about recycling old computers with "My inner hippy is dying to ask this".

He discussed, more or less, three aspects of the operation:

• Hardware Infrastructure
• Software Infrastructure
  • Google file system
  • MapReduce
  • BigTable
• Applications (Search, etc)

I