Armen Hamstra on LinkedIn’s Production Failover to Virginia Data Center

It's 8:30PM on a Friday evening, and disaster recovery plans for LinkedIn’s production data centers are deployed. A natural disaster? Phishing? A hack? All plausible, but this downtime of major LinkedIn services was in reality the result of a concerted and simulated production failover led by senior staff software engineer Armen Hamstra.

We sat down with Armen to discuss the single-master production failover to LinkedIn’s Virginia data center — the logistics, the resources, and the results. We also touched on how he, as an applications development engineer, was chosen to lead a project that falls under the systems and infrastructure scope.

By acting like an owner and taking intelligent risks — two of LinkedIn’s core values — we discussed how LinkedIn has helped him realize his potential and foster his engineering skills to where they are now.