I made it to Velocity around lunch as I was dealing with work business, but so far it’s been pretty decent. Thanks to Jesse Robbins for the invite to speak this evening at Ignite, and for access to the conference.

The day opened (for me, at least) with the Measuring Performance presentation. The general takeaway from that was “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”. That’s the mantra of most of this Operations-specific conference.

I’ve also attended a scaling presentation on Hotmail with Microsoft’s Aladdin Nassar, and while I disagreed with most of the limits that he gave in – 300kbit/s as a international limit for bandwidth (because of the speed of light… whaa?), most of his presentation is relevant to today’s site operations.

I’m currently in the Cloud Computing panel discussion, where cloud providers from Joyent, Rackspace, Engine Yard, and a few others are discussing the pros and cons of moving your application into the cloud.

I’m still a bit against cloud computing; I tend to work on web sites which are large, memory, and disk hungry monsters that simply can’t be placed into the cloud. As you increase resource utilization on cloud based sites, costs typically increase. The majority of this cost (at least on Amazon web services) is in network and disk bandwidth.

Video providers can’t run in the cloud without paying high costs, but the cloud computing environment is a perfect nursery for startups and companies which are about to experience an immediate increase in load, without the corresponding network and systems administration infrastructure to support that load. (I’m hearing from one of the Rackspace speakers that they can easily handle a half petabyte or more of storage per customer, but at what cost? They’re a very, very expensive provider!)

The cloud is also an excellent place for performing repeatable functionality testing without damaging your production environment. You can reduce cost by not instantiating your QA environment until it’s needed, and throw away QA wen you’re not using it.

Some sites further exploit this by only turning up servers when load is present, and disabling servers in the middle of the night when load is at its lowest.

They are also making predictions now that cloud computing will replace standard data center management in the future, regardless of enterprise size. I’d say, if you’re a sysadmin, it’s time to work for one of these companies or start learning a new job. The clock is ticking.

(( More posting later as I hit the various sessions. ))