Track: Microservices / Serverless Patterns & Practices

Location: Ballroom A

Day of week: Monday

Stories of success and failure building modern service and function-based applications, including event sourcing, reactive, decomposition, & more.

Track Host: Susanne Kaiser

Independent Tech Consultant, previously CTO @JustSocialApps

Susanne Kaiser is an independent tech consultant from Hamburg, Germany, and was previously working as a startup CTO transforming their SaaS solution from monolith to microservices. She has a background in computer sciences and experience in software development and software architecture for more than 15 years and regularly presents at international tech conferences.

CASE STUDY TALK (50 MIN)

10:35am - 11:25am

From Winning the Microservice War to Keeping the Peace

Many companies are focused on creating or transitioning to a microservice architecture. I will explain how this journey went for a top-tier video service & also a major games studio, and show the many advantages we found. In one company we successfully created 800+ services optimized around functionality, delivery speed and organizational structure. We won the microservices war!

However, getting there was only half the battle. Operating and evolving such significant systems reveals a number of challenges: monitoring and root cause analysis, cascading failures and scaling for major events are just some. We explain how you can use our learnings to avoid common pitfalls when working with microservices, and reveal what we would do differently if we could wind back the clock.

Andrew McVeigh, Former VP Architecture @hulu
CASE STUDY TALK (50 MIN)

11:50am - 12:40pm

Reactive DDD—When Concurrent Waxes Fluent

Developers around the world are moving to rapidly adopt Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and in greater numbers than ever before. That's because DDD delivers powerful results in practice. At the same time, Reactive software development is becoming essential to implementing responsive, resilient, elastic, and message-driven solutions, including event streams of fast data. This world of distribution, concurrency, latency, and the uncertainty of time-critical results, must be tackled along with the complex business challenges. This talk gives practical guidance on using DDD to model business-driven solutions that result in software that is fluent, type-safe, and with core Reactive properties. Specific attention is given to moving legacy systems that have deep debt to ones that have clear boundaries, deliver explicit and fluent business models, and exploit modern hardware and software architectures.

Vaughn Vernon, DDD Expert, Author of "Implementing Domain-Driven Design" & Architect @kalele_io
CASE STUDY TALK (50 MIN)

1:40pm - 2:30pm

Connecting, Managing, Observing, and Securing Services

With the growing adoption of cloud native architectures, Istio has become the de facto framework to load-balance, route, secure and monitor the traffic that flows between services. Istio provides a common networking, security, policy, and telemetry substrate for services that we call a ‘Service Mesh’. Come learn how a service mesh helps with the transition from monoliths to microservices, to empower operations teams, and to adopt security best-practices. Then we’ll touch on a few advanced use cases, like how a service mesh can help you build applications deployed across multiple clusters and multiple infrastructure providers.

Zack Butcher, Core Contributor @IstioMesh & Founding Engineer @tetrateio. Previously Software Engineer @Google
CASE STUDY TALK (50 MIN)

2:55pm - 3:45pm

Serverless and Chatbots: A Match Made in the Cloud

The Internet tutorials promised that building a chatbot was simple, and that the magic of Serverless would make it even simpler. And it was true. But it turns out that the simple runs out very quick. By the time I discovered this I was already hooked on both Conversational AI and Serverless technologies. Conversational Interfaces let users interact with technology in a new way - and Serverless lets developers build software in a new way. Combined they bring something brand new that requires both learning new skills and applying existing skills in new ways.

Our team has built an Employee Digital Assistant for the employees of our Fortune 100 company. Using practical examples from our chatbot, let me share with you some of the lessons we learned that can get you started with your own chatbot. Building a simple chatbot is simple - building a great chatbot is what I’m going to show you how to do. 

Gillian Armstrong, Cognitive Technologies @Liberty_IT
CASE STUDY TALK (50 MIN)

4:10pm - 5:00pm

Crisis to Calm: Story of Data Validation @ Netflix

The best outage is the one that never happens! Runtime system behavior is increasingly driven by data flowing from various data sources. Each update is as impactful as code pushes, if not more, increasing the risk of outages. This makes a strong case for automated detection of bad data, similar to what we already do for code pushes. To that end, we invested in detecting and preventing bad data in real time with techniques like circuit breakers and data canaries.

In this presentation, I will talk about the journey from having no data validations to our current set of techniques that are an essential part of availability at Netflix. I will share my experience in maintaining a great Netflix customer experience while enabling fast and safe data propagation.

Key takeaways:

  • Detecting and preventing bad data is essential to high availability.
  • Ways to make circuit breakers, data canaries and staggered rollout effective.
  • Efficient validations via sharding data and isolating change.

Lavanya Kanchanapalli, Senior Software Engineer @Netflix
CASE STUDY TALK (50 MIN)

5:25pm - 6:15pm

Microservices Open Space

Tracks

Monday, 5 November

Tuesday, 6 November

Wednesday, 7 November

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