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

Schedule: Distributed systems sessions

Simple tasks like running a program or storing and retrieving data become much more complicated when you do them on collections of computers, rather than single machines. Distributed systems have become a key architectural construct, but they affect everything a program would normally do. What are the main problems and challenges to look out for when transitioning to a distributed architecture? How do we deal with issues of security and fault tolerance? What’s the best way to decompose our current system into discrete services while ensuring optimal message passing?

9:00am–12:30pm Monday, February 26, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Overview
Mike Amundsen (Amundsen.com, Inc.)
Average rating: ***..
(3.86, 7 ratings)
A RESTful approach to microservices offers a number of benefits. Mike Amundsen walks you through building adaptable microservices that take advantage of the features of REST, including statelessness, self-description, and using hypermedia to discover and modify application state. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Overview
Ben Evans (jClarity)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 10 ratings)
Confused about what a blockchain is? Think you might have a need for one but are confused by all the hype (and the vendors bearing solutions)? Want to understand how blockchain can be useful to your systems and processes? Join Ben Evans to learn the basic technology underlying the blockchain, explore real use cases, and find out how to avoid antipatterns. Read more.
1:15pm–2:05pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Theoretical
Jonathan Moore (Comcast Cable)
Average rating: ****.
(4.15, 13 ratings)
Rate limiting is the most common capacity management approach for API gateways, but concurrency management is a fundamentally better concept for a variety of reasons. Jon Moore outlines the basic queuing theory behind concurrency management and shares a new algorithm for keeping misconfigured clients from causing trouble for everyone else. Read more.
1:15pm–2:05pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Case Study
Steven Wu (Netflix)
Average rating: **...
(2.42, 19 ratings)
Steven Wu explains how Netflix’s SPaaS platform empowers users to focus on extracting insights from data streams and build stream processing applications and shares lessons learned building and operating the largest SPaaS use case: Netflix’s Keystone data pipeline, a self-serve platform for creating near-real-time event pipelines that processes three trillion events and 12 PB of data every day. Read more.
2:15pm–3:05pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Framework-focused
Allard Buijze (AxonIQ)
Average rating: ****.
(4.47, 15 ratings)
Most discussions about implementing microservices start by evaluating the technical options and their challenges. However, the real business value is in functionality. Allard Buijze demonstrates how to build evolutionary microservices, starting with a single application that can be scaled out and distributed once the sensible boundaries are known. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Case Study
Georgios Gkekas (ING Bank)
Average rating: ***..
(3.33, 9 ratings)
Georgios Gkekas shares ING's advanced analytics journey to promote modern machine and deep learning techniques internally through a central, best-of-breed technical platform tailored for data science activities. The platform offers only the necessary automated tools to replace the tedious, repetitive, and error-prone steps in a typical data science pipeline. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Case Study
Tags: cloud, native
Paul Bakker (Netflix)
Average rating: ***..
(3.80, 5 ratings)
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. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Framework-focused, Hands-on
Kai Wähner (Confluent)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 2 ratings)
Kai Wähner shares a highly scalable, mission-critical infrastructure using Apache Kafka and Apache Mesos: Kafka brokers are used as the distributed messaging backbone; Kafka’s Streams API embeds stream processing into any external application without the need for a dedicated streaming cluster; and Mesos is used as a scalable infrastructure to leverage the benefits of a cloud-native platform. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Theoretical
Duncan DeVore (Lightbend)
Average rating: ***..
(3.67, 3 ratings)
Duncan DeVore discusses the ins and outs of dealing with modular JVM-based application consistency, distributed state, and identity coherence with techniques such as idempotency, eventual and casual consistency, the CAP theorem, single source of truth, and distributed domain design. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Overview
Stephen Pember (Toast)
Average rating: ***..
(3.33, 3 ratings)
Event storage offers many practical benefits to distributed systems providing complete state changes over time, but there are a number of challenges when building an event store mechanism. Stephen Pember explores some of the problems you may encounter and shares real-world patterns for working with event storage. Read more.
1:15pm–2:05pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Overview
Maria Gomez (BCG Digital Ventures)
Average rating: ***..
(3.67, 9 ratings)
Think of this talk as Microservices 201. You know microservices basics and their pros and cons and have maybe even started putting them in production but haven't spent much time thinking about how to maintain them. Maria Gomez explores the most important operational concerns for maintaining microservices and explains why observability helps you maintain a healthy production environment. Read more.
1:15pm–2:05pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Framework-focused, Theoretical
Viktor Klang (Lightbend)
Average rating: **...
(2.67, 3 ratings)
Viktor Klang offers a new take on enterprise integration patterns that builds on top of the Reactive Streams standard, an orchestration layer where transformations are standalone, composable, and reusable and—most importantly—use asynchronous flow-control (backpressure) to maintain predictable, stable behavior over time. Read more.
2:15pm–3:05pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Anti-Pattern, Best Practice
Sam Stokes (Honeycomb)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 10 ratings)
In the complex world of microservices and distributed systems, we need to understand what our software is doing. Traditional tools, such as logs, read by humans and filtered by crude rules, aren’t powerful enough. Sam Stokes explains that we need new, better tools and why this will also require us to design our systems to give the tools better data. Read more.
2:15pm–3:05pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice
Bernd Rücker (Camunda)
Average rating: ****.
(4.18, 11 ratings)
In distributed systems, some business transactions and even more end-to-end processes stretch across boundaries of individual services. While event-driven choreography leads to nicely decoupled systems, complex event chains cause headaches. Bernd Rücker explains why transforming certain events into commands is beneficial and how to avoid losing sight of larger-scale flows. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Case Study
Suudhan Rangarajan (Netflix)
Average rating: ****.
(4.83, 6 ratings)
As Netflix continues its journey beyond 100M members, the company is rearchitecting its critical Playback API service to better serve its business needs for the next three to five years. Suudhan Rangarajan discusses why and how Netflix rebuilt the Playback API service and outlines a rigorous framework that you can use to reason about your microservice architecture. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Overview
Matthew McLarty (MuleSoft)
Average rating: ****.
(4.17, 12 ratings)
Microservices have taken the software architecture world by storm. Initially driven by a desire for increased delivery velocity and greater scalability, organizations are now recognizing the importance and complexity of securing their microservices. Matt McLarty shares techniques for securing microservice APIs and a practical model you can implement in your organization. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Framework-focused
Christian Posta (solo.io)
Average rating: ****.
(4.67, 3 ratings)
When building microservices, you must solve for a number of critical functions, but the process can be incredibly complex and expensive to maintain. Christian Posta offers an overview of Envoy Proxy and Istio.io Service Mesh, explaining how they solve application networking problems more elegantly by pushing these concerns down to the infrastructure layer and demonstrating how it all works. Read more.