April, 2008
by Denise P. Kalm, DPK Coaching and CA, Inc.
Denise Kalm has 30 years experience in IT including application programming, enterprise systems management and performance management/capacity planning at Pacific Telephone and Bank of America. She moved to vendor land in 2000, spending 5 ½ years with BMC on the EPA product line, then recently became the senior product marketing manager for enterprise job scheduling products at CA, Inc., formerly Cybermation. She is a regional officer of CMG, has held many volunteer positions within that organization and is a frequent contributing author. Prior to entering the IT profession, she was a biochemical geneticist. Her hobbies include flying, Jazzercise, writing and scuba diving. Her book, Lifestorm, on the Oakland Hills fire, is available on Amazon. She is an executive and personal coach as well, offering phone and in-person coaching.
About the Author
Denise P. Kalm, CA, Inc. formerly Cybermation
The Michelson Award winner for 2007 is Adrian Cockcroft. This award is given to a professional in our industry who has made significant contributions to our field, offered an original contribution (often a new tool or product) and served as an inspiration to others.
Through his career as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun, then to eBay and now Director of Web Engineering at Netflix, Adrian continues to write papers and books designed to make systems management easier for the rest of us. He pioneered a lot of the techniques we now use for web performance monitoring - the ones he used for himself as an "early adopter" of the web. He has spoken at CMG continuously since 1994, often offering Sunday Workshops which compress a week's worth of valuable training into a day.
Many those he mentored or partnered with went on to develop tools, such as memtool and the SE Toolkit. He also worked with vendors to ensure collection of the right data and creation of useful tools to manage UNIX. One of the foremost vehicles for his ideas was the SE Toolkit, a language designed to gain access to Solaris kernel information. From that, came virtual_adrian that enabled you to monitor your system just like Adrian would. He holds two patents for performance management: one for measuring performance with statistical distributions and one for capacity planning techniques in a virtualized environment.
Adrian has done so much in these three areas that he was a clear front-runner for the nomination. In fact, he might have been the only one surprised by this acclaim. My personal experience of Adrian demonstrates the aptness of this honor. When I first worked on Sun boxes, Adrian was the go-to expert, his writings the Bible we used to manage our systems. His papers and tutorials were often reason enough to attend the national conference. And yet, despite the challenge of his schedule (his work, his writing, his speaking), he always had time to help others and share his knowledge. We last spoke to him in July of 2005 for Measure IT; this is a good opportunity to speak with him again.
Adrian: My goal at Sun was to have performance management be a competitive advantage for Solaris. I wanted to have the best instrumentation, the best tools and the widest understanding of how to manage the performance of Solaris based systems. I managed to have a small influence on instrumentation, which was already very good, a larger influence on tools - using the SE toolkit to prototype new techniques, and I'm most proud of my role in helping many people understand how to manage Solaris performance, via books and training sessions.
AC: It's easy to become typecast. The biggest challenge is to move on, and reinvent yourself. My transition from performance engineer at Sun to managing web site development at Netflix is the challenge I was looking for. It has greatly expanded my experience on several fronts.
AC: I get the most pleasure from mentoring. I like to find talented people and help them leverage and develop their talents. Now that I'm a manager I spend a lot of time hiring and building my own team. One of my main motivations for moving on from Sun and eBay was that the organizations I was part of were not expanding, and I couldn't hire people. Netflix is an amazingly great place to work and is also constantly trying to hire the very best people.
AC: In the early 1980's I ported a small C compiler to an obscure homebrew computer and wrote a 70 page language tutorial to go with it. This was well received, and in 1991 I took all the information I had collected on Sun performance and wrote a 64 page paper for a user group meeting. This kept expanding, got me a job in the USA and became the first edition of Sun Performance and Tuning. Nowadays I write blog entries less often than I should, and CMG conference paper deadlines keep me going...
AC: My current focus is Java code development for web services. I actually no longer care what operating system or hardware it is running on. However, performance management of the Tomcat application server is very primitive. I can easily measure how much time it takes to service a web request, but it's far too hard to figure out how much CPU time and memory is consumed. In general my focus is on headroom estimation, and the biggest problem we face is that the many forms of virtualization are confounding our ability to figure out what is going on.
AC: The inspiration and encouragement to write my first book came from Hal Stern (the NFS and NIS book) and Peter VanDerLinden (Deep C Secrets). Brian Wong was instrumental in getting me to move to the USA and we began writing our books alongside each other. Rich Pettit inspired me by building the SE toolkit, and the feedback from Sun customers and CMG attendees over many years told me I was doing something that mattered.
AC: For me it is confirmation that I made a difference, I succeeded in making my corner of the world a better place, and I'm very proud that my peers decided to give me this honor. In return, I'm making a special effort to present at regional and international CMG meetings.
AC: I have been at Netflix for about a year, and I'm loving it. I manage the team that decides what movies to show on each page of the web site. I'm learning a lot about scalable web applications and personalization algorithms, in a company that everyone has heard of, yet is small enough that I get to learn how everything works across the whole business.