RootsTech 2011: Day 2

Day 2 of Root­sTech start­ed with a spir­it­ed keynote address by Curt Witch­er of the Allen Coun­ty Pub­lic Library on “The Chang­ing Face of Geneal­o­gy.” His point was: The world is going dig­i­tal and going there quick­ly. Get on board, or be left behind.

Bri­an Pugh of Fam­il­y­Search pre­sent­ed a pow­er­ful talk on how the new Fam­il­y­Search web­site has uti­lized cloud ser­vices (pri­mar­i­ly from Ama­zon Web Ser­vices: http://aws.amazon.com) to pro­vide world class web­site in a cost-effi­cient man­ner. The strat­e­gy has allowed them to auto-scale up and down their ser­vices as need­ed. Addi­tion­al­ly, they are able to cre­ate data snap­shots to quick­ly build new pro­to­types of their site for devel­op­ment and test­ing. They use Ama­zon S3 as a shared filesys­tem for dynam­ic con­tent, though the per­for­mance of S3 is not designed for serv­ing up images, and so on, so they cache the data stored on S3 for actu­al deliv­ery to web browsers.

One thing they are doing on the Fam­il­y­Search web­site is uti­liz­ing Ama­zon Elas­tic IPs to allow for “hot” deploy­ment of new ver­sions of the site. They can build the new ver­sion of the site, test it, and then in a mat­ter of sec­onds, have Ama­zon redi­rect the IP address of the web­site to the new site, while keep­ing the old site in reserve. If they need to fall back to the old site, it’s again only a mat­ter of sec­onds.

They also use Ama­zon MapRe­duce to per­form com­plex com­pu­ta­tions.

Fam­il­y­Search engi­neers have made avail­able pro­gram­ming lan­guage for cre­at­ing cloud based sys­tems, avail­able at: code.google.com/p/lasic. This allows man­agers of cloud envi­ron­ments to quick­ly issue “verbs” such as

• Deploy
• Con­fig­ure
• Shut­down
• Snap­shot

One key thing that Mr. Pugh said about Ama­zon’s offer­ing in this space, is that it is being wide­ly used. Among oth­ers, he men­tioned that the New York Times, Major League Base­ball, Net­flix, 3M, Activi­sion, ESPN, NASDAQ, The Guardian, and Razor­fish (and I can add the New Eng­land His­toric Geneal­o­gy Soci­ety, based on the Fri­day lun­cheon.)

Lat­er in the day, I was able to attend a view­ing of “Who Do You Think You Are?” at the Fam­i­ly His­to­ry Library. They gave out raf­fle items, and I won a copy of Ances­try for the Mac. I then took advan­tage of the Library being open until mid­night, research­ing my Hills, John­sons, and Crows in Howard Coun­ty and Nance Coun­ty, Nebras­ka.