Jesse Robbins

Last updated
Jesse Robbins
Jesse Robbins at Ignite Seattle 4 - squared.png
Born1978 (1978) (age 45) [1]
Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts [2]
Nationality American
Occupations
  • Entrepreneur
  • investor
  • computer engineer
  • firefighter
Employer(s)Heavybit, Chef, Amazon.com
Known for

Jesse Robbins is an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and firefighter notable for his pioneering work in Cloud computing, role in creating DevOps/Chaos Engineering, and efforts to improve emergency management.

Contents

Career

Robbins is a venture capital investor at "developer-focused" firm Heavybit, with notable investments in companies like PagerDuty, Snyk, and Tailscale. [3]

Robbins worked at Amazon with his manager-approved title “Master of Disaster,” where he was responsible for website availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand. He created "GameDay", a project to increase reliability by purposefully creating major failures on a regular basis (a practice now called Chaos Engineering). [4]

Robbins has said GameDay was inspired by his experience & training as a firefighter combined with lessons from other industries and research on complex systems, human cognitive stress models, reliability engineering, and normal accidents. Game day/Chaos Engineering and similar approaches are considered a best practice for large technology companies. [5] [6]

GameDay-like programs have been adopted by many other organizations, including Google, Netflix (called Chaos Monkey), [7] Yahoo, Facebook, and many others. [5] [8]

After Amazon, Robbins founded the Velocity Conference to advance the field of Web Operations & DevOps with Tim O'Reilly. [9] He also founded Chef, a pioneering cloud infrastructure automation company. [10] [11] Jesse Robbins was also an early investor in PagerDuty. [12] [13] [14] [15]

Robbins was recognized in 2011 with the Technology Review TR35 award for "transforming the way Web companies design and manage complex networks of servers and software" at Amazon.com, founding the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference, and founding Chef and serving as the first CEO. [1] [16] [10] [12]

Other work

Robbins founded Orion Labs, a technology startup which created a "Real-Life Star Trek Communicator".He says he "wanted to bring heads-up, real-time communication to everybody" to build "a world powered by voice". [17] [18] [19] [20]

Contributions to disaster response & humanitarian aid

Robbins volunteered as “Task Force Leader” in Hurricane Katrina. After he returned, he worked with Mikel Maron and OpenStreetMap on techniques and patterns to improve technology adoption in disaster response & humanitarian aid. These improvements were adopted by the United Nations Joint Logistics Centre in response to Cyclone Nargis in 2008 and are now widely adopted. One example was CrisisCommons in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake. [21] [22] [23]

Awards and recognition

2021 - Robbins named to The Seed 100: the Best Early-Stage Investors of 2021 [24]

2012 - Robbins was named as a Top 10 Cloud Computing Leader of 2012 by TechTarget [25]

2011 - Robbins was selected by MIT Technology Review magazine as one of the top "35 under 35" TR35 innovators in for "transforming the way Web companies design and manage complex networks of servers and software" while building fault-tolerant online infrastructure at Amazon.com and at Chef. [1] [10] [12]

2010 - Robbins was selected by Business Journal as one of the top "40 under 40" entrepreneurs in 2010 for founding Chef and raising $13 million in venture capital funding. [2] [16]

Related Research Articles

Data engineering refers to the building of systems to enable the collection and usage of data. This data is usually used to enable subsequent analysis and data science; which often involves machine learning. Making the data usable usually involves substantial compute and storage, as well as data processing and cleaning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amazon Web Services</span> On-demand cloud computing company

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. Oftentimes, clients will use this in combination with autoscaling. These cloud computing web services provide various services related to networking, compute, storage, middleware, IoT and other processing capacity, as well as software tools via AWS server farms. This frees clients from managing, scaling, and patching hardware and operating systems. One of the foundational services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, with extremely high availability, which can be interacted with over the internet via REST APIs, a CLI or the AWS console. AWS's virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; hard-disk/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Turnbull</span>

James Turnbull is an Australian free software and open source author and software developer. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is VP of Product and Engineering at Smartrr and an advisor at Access Now. Before that, he was co-chair of the Velocity conference, led engineering at Sotheby's, startup advocacy at Microsoft, was founder and CTO at Empatico, CTO at Kickstarter, VP of Engineering at Venmo and VP of Services at Docker. He was also VP of Technology Operations for the open-source company Puppet Labs.

Eucalyptus is a paid and open-source computer software for building Amazon Web Services (AWS)-compatible private and hybrid cloud computing environments, originally developed by the company Eucalyptus Systems. Eucalyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. Eucalyptus enables pooling compute, storage, and network resources that can be dynamically scaled up or down as application workloads change. Mårten Mickos was the CEO of Eucalyptus. In September 2014, Eucalyptus was acquired by Hewlett-Packard and then maintained by DXC Technology. After DXC stopped developing the product in late 2017, AppScale Systems forked the code and started supporting Eucalyptus customers.

Progress Chef is a configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. It uses a pure-Ruby, domain-specific language (DSL) for writing system configuration "recipes". Chef is used to streamline the task of configuring and maintaining a company's servers, and can integrate with cloud-based platforms such as Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, OpenStack, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace to automatically provision and configure new machines. Chef contains solutions for both small and large scale systems.

DevOps is a methodology in the software development and IT industry. Used as a set of practices and tools, DevOps integrates and automates the work of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) as a means for improving and shortening the systems development life cycle.

In software engineering, service virtualization or service virtualisation is a method to emulate the behavior of specific components in heterogeneous component-based applications such as API-driven applications, cloud-based applications and service-oriented architectures. It is used to provide software development and QA/testing teams access to dependent system components that are needed to exercise an application under test (AUT), but are unavailable or difficult-to-access for development and testing purposes. With the behavior of the dependent components "virtualized", testing and development can proceed without accessing the actual live components. Service virtualization is recognized by vendors, industry analysts, and industry publications as being different than mocking. See here for a Comparison of API simulation tools.

Lunacloud is a cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service provider based in Lisbon, Portugal.

CopperEgg Corporation is a cloud computing systems management company based out of Austin, Texas. CopperEgg provides a family of Software as a Service (SaaS) based cloud monitoring services for public and private cloud environments. These services include server monitoring, website monitoring, and web application monitoring that system and application performance, and alerts on and helps troubleshoot system and application issues. CRN Magazine included the company on its list of 10 hot new cloud startups to watch in 2011. In 2013, the company was recognized with the North America Frost & Sullivan Award for New Product Innovation within Cloud Monitoring Solutions. The company has strategic partnerships with companies such as Amazon AWS, advanced technical partner; Rackspace; SolarWinds; and Blitz IO.

CloudBees is an enterprise software delivery company. Sacha Labourey and Francois Dechery co-founded the company in early 2010, and investors include Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, HSBC, Verizon Ventures, Golub Capital, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bridgepoint Group.

Cloud management is the management of cloud computing products and services.

In software engineering, a microservice architecture is a variant of the service-oriented architecture structural style. It is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightweight protocols. One of its goals is that teams can develop and deploy their services independently of others. This is achieved by the reduction of several dependencies in the code base, allowing developers to evolve their services with limited restrictions from users, and for additional complexity to be hidden from users. As a consequence, organizations are able to develop software with fast growth and size, as well as use off-the-shelf services more easily. Communication requirements are reduced. These benefits come at a cost to maintaining the decoupling. Interfaces need to be designed carefully and treated as a public API. One technique that is used is having multiple interfaces on the same service, or multiple versions of the same service, so as to not disrupt existing users of the code.

Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system in order to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dynatrace</span> American technology company

Dynatrace, Inc. is a global technology company listed on the NYSE that provides a software intelligence platform based on artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Dynatrace technologies are used to monitor and optimize application performance, software development and security practices, IT infrastructure, and user experience for businesses and government agencies throughout the world.

Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. The IT infrastructure managed by this process comprises both physical equipment, such as bare-metal servers, as well as virtual machines, and associated configuration resources. The definitions may be in a version control system. The code in the definition files may use either scripts or declarative definitions, rather than maintaining the code through manual processes, but IaC more often employs declarative approaches.


Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a set of principles and practices that applies aspects of software engineering to IT infrastructure and operations. SRE claims to create highly reliable and scalable software systems. Although they are closely related, SRE is slightly different from DevOps.

Docker, Inc. is an American technology company that develops productivity tools built around Docker, which automates the deployment of code inside software containers. Major commercial products of the company are Docker Hub, a central repository of containers, Docker Desktop, a GUI application for Windows and Mac to manage containers. The historic offering was Docker Enterprise PaaS business, acquired by Mirantis. The company is also an active contributor to various CNCF projects, such as containerd and runC. The main open source offering of the company are Docker Engine and buildkit which are rebranded under the Moby umbrella project. Though, the core specification, Dockerfile, still includes the company trademark.

<i>Accelerate</i> (book)

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations is a software engineering book co-authored by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim. The book explores how software development teams using Lean Software and DevOps can measure their performance and the performance of software engineering teams impacts the overall performance of an organization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Coldwater</span> American computer security specialist

Ian Coldwater is an American computer security specialist, hacker, and speaker specializing in Kubernetes and cloud native security. They are a security architect at Twilio, and co-chair the Kubernetes special interest group Kubernetes SIG Security.

StrongDM is an American technology company that develops an infrastructure access platform.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Technology Review TR35 Profile: Jesse Robbins" . Retrieved 2011-12-14.
  2. 1 2 "2010 40 UNDER 40 JESSE ROBBINS". Archived from the original on 2012-04-24. Retrieved 2011-12-14.
  3. ↑ Cai, Kenrick. "Heavybit Raises $80 Million Fund To Back The Developer Tools That Other VCs Misunderstand". Forbes. Retrieved 2023-02-24.
  4. ↑ John Allspaw; Jesse Robbins; Allspaw, John (2010). Web operations : keeping the data on time (1st ed.). Beijing: O'Reilly. p. 336. ISBN   978-1-4493-7744-1.
  5. 1 2 Jesse Robbins; Kripa Krishnan; John Allspaw; Tom Limoncelli (12 September 2012). "Resilience Engineering: Learning to Embrace Failure". ACM Queue.
  6. ↑ Logan, Martin. "DevOps Culture Hacks talk from Jesse Robbins". DevOps.com. Retrieved 13 Feb 2012.
  7. ↑ Williams, Alex. "Netflix Open Sources Chaos Monkey – A Tool Designed To Cause Failure So You Can Make A Stronger Cloud". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2018-03-07.
  8. ↑ Haryadi Gunawi; Thanh Do; Joseph M. Hellerstein; Ion Stoica; Dhruba Borthakur; Jesse Robbins (28 July 2011). "Failure as a Service (FaaS): A Cloud Service for Large-Scale, Online Failure Drills" (PDF). Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California at Berkeley: 7. Retrieved 24 June 2013.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  9. ↑ O'Reilly, Tim (17 June 2013). "Why We Started the Velocity Conference". O'Reilly Radar. Retrieved 24 June 2013.
  10. 1 2 3 Mets, Cade (26 October 2011). "The Chef, the Puppet, and the Sexy IT Admin". Wired Magazine. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  11. ↑ Asay, Matt (5 November 2015). "Building Your Own Cloud Is "Table Stakes," Says Former AWS Engineer". ReadWrite. Retrieved 7 November 2015.
  12. 1 2 3 Vance, Ashlee (1 September 2011). "Puppet, Chef Ease Transition to Cloud Computing". Businessweek. Archived from the original on September 24, 2011. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  13. ↑ Brumleve, Harry (17 Jan 2013). "The Rise of DevOps with Jesse Robbins". InfoQ. Retrieved 29 May 2013.
  14. ↑ Taylor, Colleen (23 June 2011). "DevOps eliminates knee-jerk no's at the IT level". GigaOm. Retrieved 13 Aug 2011.
  15. ↑ Edwards, Damon; Willis, John (20 Sep 2011). "DevOps Cafe Episode 19". DevOpsCafe. Archived from the original on 28 September 2011. Retrieved 29 May 2013. Alt URL
  16. 1 2 John, Cook (16 September 2010). "Fourteen local techies under 40, and the cool stuff they've done". Puget Sound Business Journal - Techflash. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  17. ↑ Fox, Pimm (6 Feb 2015). "Orion Labs Creates Real-Life Star Trek Communicator". Bloomberg Television. Retrieved 3 Mar 2015.
  18. ↑ Metz, Cade (21 January 2015). "'Star Trek Communicator Startup' Sets Out to Build a World Powered by Voice". Wired. Retrieved 12 March 2015.
  19. ↑ Gruber, Ben (29 Apr 2015). "Hands free talk with global reach and style". Reuters. Thomson Reuters. Retrieved 4 June 2015.
  20. ↑ Fox, Pimm (5 Feb 2015). "Orion Labs Creates Real-Life Star Trek Communicator". Bloomberg. BloombergBusiness. Retrieved 4 April 2015.
  21. ↑ Ginsburg, Janet (7 July 2008). "The Do-Good Imperative". Businessweek. Archived from the original on July 12, 2008. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  22. ↑ King, Rachael (7 July 2008). "Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes". Businessweek. Archived from the original on July 12, 2008. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  23. ↑ Turner, Andrew. "CrisisCommons and Congress" . Retrieved 29 January 2015.
  24. ↑ Haley, Margaux MacColl, Melia Russell, Candy Cheng, Michael. "The Seed 100: The best early-stage investors of 2021". Business Insider. Retrieved 2023-02-24.
  25. ↑ "Top 10 cloud computing leaders in 2012". 20 March 2012.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.