Suudhan Rangarajan | QCon San Francisco 2018

Next QConSF Conference: Applied AI for Developers QCon.ai April 2019

Speaker: Suudhan Rangarajan

Senior Software Engineer @Netflix

Suudhan Rangarajan works on the Playback API team at Netflix, responsible for ensuring that customers receive the best possible playback experience every time they click play. A few dozen playback microservices fill a key role in enabling Netflix to stream amazing content to 125M+ members on 1000+ devices. Prior to Netflix, Suudhan worked on the Audio/Video decoding pipeline in Adobe Flash and Adobe Primetime products helping many partners create a great video streaming client. Suudhan enjoys developing and running large scale distributed services, with a special focus on Netflix Playback API architecture and design. Suudhan has received a Masters in Computer Science from University of Texas at Austin.

Find Suudhan Rangarajan at

@suudhan

Talk : Netflix Play API - An Evolutionary Architecture

Track : Architectures You've Always Wondered About

Location : Ballroom A

Day of week : Tuesday

Duration : 1:40pm - 2:30pm

The Play API Service is responsible for orchestrating all playback workflows whenever a user watches a title on Netflix. If the Play API service is down, Netflix is down. In its seven-year journey, the service has gone through three major re-architectures: Take-1 began with a traditional monolith where the API and its associated business functions were all part of the same service. Take-2 was about decomposing the monolith into a few key microservices - but, in the process, we inadvertently built a distributed monolith with tight coupling and thick client libraries. With Take-3, our goal is to break away from a distributed monolith and to build an evolutionary microservice architecture which puts change-driven-design first above all other principles.

This talk will deep dive into how we used a set of three core foundational principles to iteratively develop our architecture. Along with providing the necessary motivation behind our goals, I will specifically talk about what patterns we observed in our previous architectures and how we arrived at a list of practices to create an Evolutionary Architecture. If you are building a new set of services or considering a major re-architecture, this talk provides you with a framework to reason about your use-cases.

This talk is intended for engineers with experience in service-based architectures

Key Takeaways:

Three foundational principles that can guide you in designing a microservice architecture:

Why focussing on “identity” lays the foundation for your architectural design
Why it is important to identify Type1/Type2 decisions
Why evolvability is crucial, specifically when it comes to “known unknowns”!

Concrete lessons learned around:

Different types of coupling and its limitations
How we can choose a mix of async/sync architectures to unlock evolvability
Ensuring we are not building a Data Monolith

Other talks from track Architectures You've Always Wondered About

Real-World Architecture Panel

VP Engineering @WeWork, Previously @StitchFix @Google & @Ebay

Randy Shoup

Real-World Architecture Panel

Senior Construction Technology Disrupter @WeWork

David Banyard

Real-World Architecture Panel

CEO and cofounder of Dusty Robotics

Tessa Lau

Real-World Architecture Panel

Robotics Systems Developer at AddRobots

Jeff Williams

Real-World Architecture Panel

Sr. Staff Software Engineer @Tesla

Colin Breck

Paying Technical Debt at Scale - Migrations @Stripe

Foundation Engineering @Stripe

Will Larson

Scaling Slack - The Good, the Unexpected, and the Road Ahead

Principal Engineer - Infrastructure @SlackHQ

Mike Demmer

What We Got Wrong: Lessons From the Birth of Microservices

CEO and co-founder @LightStepHQ, Co-creator @OpenTracing API standard

Ben Sigelman

Airbnb's Great Migration: From Monolith to Service-Oriented

Software Engineer @Airbnb

Jessica Tai

Tracks

Monday, 5 November

Microservices / Serverless Patterns & Practices

Evolving, observing, persisting, and building modern microservices
Practices of DevOps & Lean Thinking

Practical approaches using DevOps & Lean Thinking
JavaScript & Web Tech

Beyond JavaScript in the Browser. Exploring WebAssembly, Electron, & Modern Frameworks
Modern CS in the Real World

Thoughts pushing software forward, including consensus, CRDT's, formal methods, & probabilistic programming
Modern Operating Systems

Applied, practical, & real-world deep-dive into industry adoption of OS, containers and virtualization, including Linux on Windows, LinuxKit, and Unikernels
Optimizing You: Human Skills for Individuals

Better teams start with a better self. Learn practical skills for IC

Tuesday, 6 November

Architectures You've Always Wondered About

Next-gen architectures from the most admired companies in software, such as Netflix, Google, Facebook, Twitter, & more
21st Century Languages

Lessons learned from languages like Rust, Go-lang, Swift, Kotlin, and more.
Emerging Trends in Data Engineering

Showcasing DataEng tech and highlighting the strengths of each in real-world applications.
Bare Knuckle Performance

Killing latency and getting the most out of your hardware
Socially Conscious Software

Building socially responsible software that protects users privacy & safety
Delivering on the Promise of Containers

Runtime containers, libraries, and services that power microservices

Wednesday, 7 November

Applied AI & Machine Learning

Applied machine learning lessons for SWEs, including tech around TensorFlow, TPUs, Keras, PyTorch, & more
Production Readiness: Building Resilient Systems

More than just building software, building deployable production ready software
Developer Experience: Level up your Engineering Effectiveness

Improving the end to end developer experience - design, dev, test, deploy, operate/understand.
Security: Lessons Attacking & Defending

Security from the defender's AND the attacker's point of view
Future of Human Computer Interaction

IoT, voice, mobile: Interfaces pushing the boundary of what we consider to be the interface
Enterprise Languages

Workhorse languages found in modern enterprises. Expect Java, .NET, & Node in this track

This Year's Schedule

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