Velocity 2008, the New O’Reilly Conference about website performance and operations

Velocity is a conference that is about everything around those four magic words on Internet : Fast, Scalable, Resilient and Available. More and more ads, increase of audience but not necessarily increase of revenue, more ans more complex infrastructure : managing performance of web site, control and anticipate peaks, are key issues. Even if it’s impossible to be exhaustive, " there is no such an equivalent event dedicated web infrastructure and existing tools" recognized Julien Lecomte, a French engineer working at Yahoo ! who was presenting a session dedicated to Ajax and how increase its applications performance.

The conference was co-chaired by Steve Souders (Google) and Jesse Robbins (O’Reilly Radar). This is the introduction :

The event was the opportunity for some companies to do announcements : Keynote Systems (San Mateo based company) has announced KITE 2.0. (Keynote Internet Testing Environment) a new desktop-based test and measurement environment for recording, editing and analyzing the performance of Web sites from the desktop and Internet cloud that will bridge the gap between web application developers, QA teams, performance analysts and web operations. KITE is free and to take part of Early Adopter Program starting in August 2008 sign up at http://kite.keynote.com

The following video from Keynote team gives a good idea of this kind of applications :

In Europe, there are some companies like Witbe (company based in Paris) which are competing in this specific niche which will surely become larger as this cloud computing concept is becoming more and more on the scene of Internet new challenges.