Architectures You've Always Wondered About

Architectures You've Always Wondered About showcases real-world examples of companies pushing the limits of modern software systems. In these practitioner-focused talks, we discuss complex problems faced by some of the most well known companies in software. The challenges range from delivery speed to massive scale and from dizzying complexity to simple ingenuity. 

The track features:

  • AWS: AWS Lambda is synonymous with serverless compute. This talk discusses the architecture of AWS Lambda from one of their system principals.
  • Cloudflare: Roughly 20% of all internet traffic runs through cloud-flare content and delivery infrastructure. In this talk, we’ll look at how Cloudflare thinks about edge compute and some of their strategies for dealing with relational data.
  • NIST: 800-207A is all about Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) and the principles it's laid out on. In this presentation, we hear from one of the founding engineers of Tetrate and member of the original core Istio team discussing practical implementation details of ZTA.
  • Netflix: With 220 million memberships, Netflix manages a large-scale distributed system. In this talk, Netflix shares how they manage their system, architecture bets, technology choices, and operational semantics in their membership platform.
  • Pinterest: Dive into the dynamic world of social media advertising and see how Pinterest builds their Ad Serving/Ranking infrastructure and hear about the journey from linear regression to deep learning models. 

In this track, you learn what it takes to operate modern, high scale systems from the engineers and leaders building them. This is a practitioner track where you will take away architectural patterns/anti-patterns, challenges, and hard-earned lessons from some of the world’s most recognizable software shops. 

The Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About track at QCon is one of the marque tracks at the conference. It’s one you don't want to miss!

 


From this track

Session Serverless

AWS Lambda Under the Hood

Monday Oct 2 / 10:35AM PDT

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service running at a massive scale! Supporting packages of up to 10GiB while allowing over 15K new containers per second (for a single customer) and serving millions of TPS across millions of unique workflows is a challenging problem.

Speaker image - Mike Danilov

Mike Danilov

Senior Principal Engineer @AWS Lambda

Session Database

Relational Data at the Edge

Monday Oct 2 / 11:45AM PDT

Data storage and access at the edge delivers massive performance gains by reducing location-sensitive latency.

Speaker image - Justin Kwan

Justin Kwan

Software Engineer Intern - iCloud Edge @Apple, Previously @Cloudflare

Speaker image - Vignesh Ravichandran

Vignesh Ravichandran

Engineering Manager @Cloudflare, Contributor to Postgres, Previously at Ticketmaster

Session K8s

NIST 800-207A: Implementing Zero Trust Architecture

Monday Oct 2 / 01:35PM PDT

Zero Trust is all about replacing implicit trust based on perimeter security and network access with explicit trust based on identity and runtime authorization.

Speaker image - Zack Butcher

Zack Butcher

Founding Engineer @Tetrateio & NIST co-author on security, prev core services @GoogleCloud

Session Distributed Systems

Managing 238M Memberships at Netflix

Monday Oct 2 / 02:45PM PDT

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes when you sit back, relax and watch Netflix? How does Netflix own and operate their system of record for all members making sure they continue to be in good standing and get the best experience possible?

Speaker image - Surabhi Diwan

Surabhi Diwan

Senior Software Engineer @Netflix

Session

Unconference: Architectures You've Always Wondered About

Monday Oct 2 / 03:55PM PDT

What is an unconference? An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. Attendees come together, bringing their challenges and relying on the experience and know-how of their peers for solutions.

Session Recommender Systems

Unpacking how Ads Ranking Works @Pinterest

Monday Oct 2 / 05:05PM PDT

In this session, we delve into the dynamic world of social media advertising. Facebook, Snap, Pinterest, Twitter, and many others generate the majority of their revenue from targeted ads.

Speaker image - Aayush Mudgal

Aayush Mudgal

Senior Machine Learning Engineer @Pinterest, Focusing on Privacy Safe Recommender Systems, IIT Kanpur Alumnus

Track Host

Wes Reisz

Technical Principal @EqualExperts, ex-Thoughtworker & ex-VMWare, 16-Time QCon Chair, Creator/Co-host of The InfoQ Podcast

Wes has been an active member of the QCon and InfoQ communities since 2015. Professionally, he is a Technical Principal at Equal Experts, where he specializes in app modernization and platform engineering. Wes embraces the notion of the T-shaped engineer, blending broad expertise across a wide range of software domains with deep technical knowledge in the cloud-native ecosystem. He believes in the transformative power of speaking, teaching, and continuous learning.

Wes has over 20 years of experience in software engineering. During that time, he has chaired more than 15 QCon software conferences in San Francisco, London, and New York; created the well-respected InfoQ Podcast; and spent over 10 years teaching 400-level courses on software architecture and programming at the University of Louisville. These experiences have provided him with broad knowledge across a wide range of areas in software while fostering technical depth in software architecture, cloud-native engineering, and platform thinking.

Before joining Equal Experts, Wes held technical leadership roles at Thoughtworks, where he focused on cloud and modernization; at VMware, as a Tanzu Platform Architect specializing in Spring, Kubernetes, and the developer path to production; and at an edge-related startup, where he served as VP of Technology, driving innovation at the edge.

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