Presentation: "Architecting for Continuous Delivery at Ancestry.com. MOVED TO SEACLIFF CD"

Time: Friday 13:30 - 14:20

Location: Seacliff CD

Abstract: "Ancestry.com is the leading online family history website, with more than 2 million subscribers, many petabytes of genealogical records, and more than 160 services. As the subscriber base grew and Ancestry began to expand its customer base the need to innovate more rapidly became paramount and a focus on enabling continuous delivery emerged.Attempting to do continuous delivery not only requires changes in culture, technical practices, and infrastructure, but also requires a system architecture that supports it. The challenge at Ancestry was to migrate from a monolithic, coupled stack to a more service-oriented one that allowed teams to deploy code independently to the website without extensive coordination.  Just like Ancestry, many companies that want to do continuous delivery find they can’t because their system architecture is the bottleneck.
This presentation will discuss Ancestry.com’s transformation to a service-oriented architecture capable of supporting continuous delivery. We will discuss the architectural standards that guided the transformation and how we quantified architectural debt to determine which parts of the stack needed rework. Lastly, we will show how continuous delivery works in the context of the Ancestry.com architecture"

John Esser, Director of Engineering Productivity, Ancestry.com

 John  Esser
John is currently the Director of Engineering Productivity and Agile Development at Ancestry.com. His team’s mission is to accelerate engineering’s ability to deliver value to the customer. He is the architect of Ancestry’s transformation to Agile development and continuous delivery. John has more than 25 years software development experience working for such companies as IBM, Corel, Callware Technologies, and Control4. His spare time is gobbled up by his beautiful wife, four teenage sons, reading lots of books, and fly-fishing for trout on the Provo River.

Russell Barnett, Chief Architect, Ancestry.com

 Russell  Barnett
Russ has worked as a Chief Architect for Ancestry.com for the last ten years.  He began his career at Ancestry by revamping their search and content publishing systems and more recently he has been instrumental in their transition to a more service-oriented architecture.  His passion is for building highly scalable, available, and agile architectures. Prior to Ancestry, Russ worked for IBM, Folio, and NextPage, where he gained much of his 20 years of experience working with large distributed systems.  Russ is an avid cyclist and enjoys cycling and hiking in the mountains near his home.