I am in São Paolo, Brazil for the 2012 AWS Latin America Summit and for The Next Web Latin America conference. I will also be visiting Chile and Mexico on this trip and have the great fortune to meet many of our Latin American AWS customers.

Staged Event-Driven Architecture.

Matt Welsh’s thesis work at Berkeley was on building high-performance internet services. In a time when the debates on Threads vs Events were still rampant he came up with a practical and elegant approach of combining both, delivering excellent results. Several of the principles from this paper have made it into systems I have since built. I have been a fan of much of Matt’s work as he combined common sense engineering with excellent intellectual innovation.

SEDA: An Architecture for Well-Conditioned, Scalable Internet Services, Matt Welsh, David Culler, and Eric Brewer. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP-18), Banff, Canada, October, 2001.

You can find other papers on the topic, Matt’s thesis, several presentation and some software at his Harvard web page: SEDA: An Architecture for Highly Concurrent Server Applications