Author Archives: Kevin Duffey

About Kevin Duffey

As Sr. Director of IT Operations, Kevin brings more than 25 years of engineering, operations and management experience in both the public and private sector to RichRelevance. At RichRelevance, he is responsible for aligning business requirements with IT operations, and managing complex budgets and vendors to meet customer needs. His team maintains 100% uptime and performance of 8 global datacenters that deliver over 350 million recommendations each day on more than 100 retail websites. A core tenet of his team is continued innovation of IT using the latest technology, including Hadoop with HBase, Postgres 9 and Intel Gen3 SSDs. Prior to RichRelevance, Kevin worked in the public, private and entrepreneurial sectors for diverse companies such as the GSA, AARP, Sonopia and Marketo.

Scaling the peaks of Black Friday, Bob Hope and how RichRelevance slays the holiday rush

by Kevin Duffey in Cloud Computing, Data Performance, IT Infrastructure, Personalization, RichRelevance Team on November 30, 2011

Jan 2011 after the 2010 holiday season…. Still in the glow of 100% uptime, response rates around 80ms, 5.5K requests per second served at peak. We’re all sitting around in IT Ops excited, pumped and ecstatic for our performance. We’re beating our chests and basking in the glow of success. 5500 Requests per Second (RPS) … Continue Reading

Cost of Service: Moving Beyond Savings to Drive Creativity and Innovation

by Kevin Duffey in Cloud Computing, Miscellaneous on August 15, 2011

Simply put, cost of service “measures what it costs to create, deliver and maintain a service including labor, 3rd party services, supplies, licensing, goods, etc.”  YAWN – I think I’m turning into the Dilbert pointy haired boss!  But while it may sound boring, cost of service (COS) is critical to a company’s viability as it … Continue Reading