Engineering the Future of Software
Feb 25–26, 2018: Training
Feb 26–28, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
New York, NY

Edge PaaS: A Netflix case study about edge service architecture

Paul Bakker (Netflix)
3:50pm–4:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Cloud native, Devops, Distributed systems, Microservices, Serverless
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Case Study
Tags: cloud, native
Average rating: ***..
(3.80, 5 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

  • Architects and tech leads

Prerequisite knowledge

  • Familiarity with large-scale distributed systems (and their challenges)

What you'll learn

  • Explore Netflix's architectures for developing, deploying, and running edge services
  • Learn how to improve the on-call experience for edge developers

Description

Netflix has become the poster child for microservices architecture. Although microservices can solve many problems, they also introduce many new challenges. How do feature teams (device teams, UI, etc.) connect efficiently to backend services in a microservices architecture? How do you create an edge API that satisfies teams with vastly different requirements? And how do you operate these mission-critical edge services?

Paul Bakker discusses these challenges and offers an overview of Netflix’s PaaS built specifically for edge services. The highly customized PaaS helps feature teams deploy their own edge services and eases the burden of being on call. There have been multiple iterations of this PaaS. Paul shares the pros and cons of these approaches and some lessons learned the hard way. Paul also outlines the key technologies used to implement the architecture as well as the development process and operations model.

Topics include:

  • The Netflix edge architecture
  • The need for customized edge services
  • Running edge services with a very high change rate
  • Managed environments: Ease of use versus control
  • Monitoring production and surviving being on call
Photo of Paul Bakker

Paul Bakker

Netflix

Paul Bakker is a senior software engineer on the edge developer experience team at Netflix, where he primarily works on tools to increase developer productivity within the company. Besides a love for writing code, Paul has a passion for sharing knowledge. He’s the coauthor of Java 9 Modularity and Modular Cloud Apps with OSGi, both from O’Reilly. Paul is also a frequent speaker at conferences about modularity, container technology, and many other topics. He blogs at Paulbakker.io and tweets as @pbakker.