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Program chairs Chris Guzikowski and Neal Ford open the first day of keynotes.

Architects generally concern themselves with change: a system that’s never going to change in functionality, scope, scale, or environment may not actually need an architect. Join Gregor Hohpe to find out how architects can use what they know about technical systems to help refactor organizations.

Today, we are witnessing a great proliferation of cloud-native paradigms such as 12-factor apps, microservices, and serverless. Tamar Eilam discusses an emerging unified cloud platform (based on open source projects such as Kubernetes and Istio) and explains why the new frontier is its evolution to unify multiple programming paradigms for greater simplification with power of expression.

Trisha Gee shares advice and lessons she learned the hard way while managing her career as a developer, lead, and technical advocate. She also gives you tools for working out what your next steps are along with plenty of examples of what not to do.

In a new series of interviews called "From the Trenches," Neal Ford interviews highly regarded industry professions about their career path and their work as an architect. Join in for his discussion with Mark Richards.

Ruth Malan revisits architecture modeling in light of Agile. Through a discussion of architecture and related views, heuristics, and other guidelines, Ruth considers the role of visual design in setting design direction for the system and explores design options as part of an Agile approach.

The software delivery industry has proven that it can deliver better products by implementing continuous delivery, but can this be achieved when there are hardware components? Maria Gomez demonstrates it's possible and shares her experience on a project developing embedded systems in an iterative way.

As our world becomes digital, we all need to be developing systems that are secure by design. The security community has developed a well-understood set of principles used to build secure systems, but they are rarely discussed outside that community. Eoin Woods outlines these fundamental principles of secure software design and explains how to apply them to mainstream systems.

A few years ago, Barclays embarked on a journey to migrate its legacy services with the objective of achieving a high level of scale, resilience, and reliability, mainly employing an ecosystem of focused, distributed services. Prem Chandrasekaran recounts some of the challenges faced during the transformation and sheds light on the things that worked well and those that didn't.

Threat modeling as a discipline has always enjoyed a special place in development, going from "Why do it?" to "I should do it one of these days" to "We did it and didn't even get a T-shirt." Many competing methodologies, interests, and constraints help make the process more difficult than it needs to be, reducing the results. Izar Tarandach shares the approach Autodesk uses for threat modeling.

Containers are all the rage these days, but how do you go from a single sandbox cluster to a globally distributed enterprise-scale architecture. Christopher Grant covers both infrastructure and application design best practices, such as hybrid and multicluster configurations as well as decomposing applications into system, service, and microservices.

Kubernetes is catching on like wildfire. But as organizations move to this new platform, they end up with legacy applications that don’t take advantage of everything Kubernetes has to offer—or worse, with applications that don’t work at all. Aaron Schlesinger shares an “Elements of Kubernetes” guide that details patterns to ensure your application fits into the Kubernetes platform.

Once you decide to adopt a microservices architecture, you'll face many more decisions and questions about routing, management, observability, developer experience, and more. Mason Jones shares approaches based on his real-world experiences making the shift to microservices.

Deploying your Java application in a Kubernetes cluster can sometimes feel like Alice in Wonderland. You keep going down the rabbit hole and don’t know how to make that ride comfortable. Join Arun Gupta to learn how a Java application can be deployed in a Kubernetes cluster.

Ryan Cooke explains how one organization transformed its architecture from a few hundred disparate servers to running entirely in container orchestration within six months. While the project met its goal to reduce infrastructure costs, it also realized an unexpected benefit: greatly improving developers' velocity in delivering software into production.

Every software system has an architecture. Many are little more than the result of circumstances, rather than deliberate decisions. Helping teams think about software architecture is a key to helping them grow well. James Thompson demonstrates how to assess approaches and make decisions based on what matters to your team and your projects.

Mike Roberts leads a warts-and-all journey through some of the limitations of a serverless approach and shares a practical set of techniques for dealing with these concerns.

Jonny LeRoy details two architectural failure modes: hierarchical command and control from ivory tower architects with strict approvals and rigorous control gates, and chaos with every team doing whatever they want with close to zero governance. Jonny then explores the "Goldilocks" zone that ensures organizational risks and opportunities are handled while giving teams as much autonomy as possible.

When personalizing for news platforms, you must pay attention to both the audience and the content. Much like most software architecture systems, readers and news content should not be treated as a monolith. Katerina Iliakopoulou details the architecture of a system that facilitates agile personalization on the New York Times’s platforms to accommodate fast A/B testing.

So you think you can test your complex distributed application effectively just using your test environment? At Netflix, automated testing of client and server applications runs at scale in production. It has quickly gone from low-volume manual mode to automated continuous and voluminous mode. Vasanth Asokan offers a study of such testing at scale that will inform your overall testing strategy.

The lines between static and dynamic content are blurred, and it’s more difficult than ever to choose the right technologies for your requirements and budget. John Chapin takes you on a step-by-step journey from hosting static content on AWS S3 to deploying dynamic, complex business logic mere milliseconds away from your users with AWS CloudFront, Lambda@Edge, and more.

As fans of serverless and event-driven architectures, Kenny Baas-Schwegler and Marc Duiker wanted to see how easy it was to create a serverless application in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud—specifically, by comparing how easy it is to orchestrate functions, using a current car park management example solution. Join them to learn the pros and cons of each cloud vendor.

Everything fails at some level, in some way, some of the time. How we deal with those failures can ruin our day or help us learn and grow. Join James Thompson to explore some of the patterns for dealing with failure in service-based systems graciously.

You have a large talented group of engineers, each with an opinion on the best programming language, build tool, test framework, and CI/CD pipeline. How do you get them to agree and reuse without demotivating them? Andrey Utis explains how Capital One mandated a single CI/CD framework and kept users engaged through a contribution process, empathy interviews, and openness.

Architects in large enterprises are often seen as ivory tower residents far detached from reality. Large-scale IT transformation across a vast inventory of applications and business units puts an entirely different and much more exciting spin on enterprise architecture. Gregor Hohpe takes a serious but lighthearted look at the role of enterprise architects in modern IT organizations.

Even if you're not ready to adopt a microservices architecture, you still want the benefits of rapidly deployable, highly automated infrastructure that enables rapid delivery of new features and services. Paula Paul and Rosemary Wang offer a deeper look at the necessary set of products and capabilities for a delivery infrastructure to support a distributed service or microservice architecture.

You're probably skeptical of the hype around service mesh technology. Join Andrew Jenkins to learn how incremental adoption can make a service mesh successful on your terms. You'll learn trade-offs around a few of the top capabilities so you can prioritize what your project adopts today and what you can defer based on your own risk-reward profile.

Aaron Parecki discusses common security threats when building microservices using OAuth and how to protect yourself. You'll learn about high-profile API security breaches related to OAuth; common implementation patterns for mobile apps, browser-based apps, and web server apps; and the latest best practices around OAuth security being developed by the IETF OAuth working group.

Despite its success in building an engineering and DevOps culture, when Capital One embarked on the gargantuan task of embracing microservices several years ago, it had to do an analysis of which of its development and operational practices were applicable to the new architectural style and which had to be fundamentally reevaluated. Irakli Nadareishvili shares lessons learned from the process.

A cell-based architecture is a composable unit of architecture that is self-contained. The cell is independently scalable. It’s independently deployable. It’s independently governed. It's part of an ecosystem of cells. Asanka Abeysinghe explains how to use a cell-based architecture to connect architecture, implementation, and deployment by making autonomous development teams.

Adam Zimman discusses the history of SDLC models before diving into the next phase of evolution: progressive delivery. Adam explores the benefits of the progressive delivery model, with a focus on business value of rapid delivery as a method to reduce risk.

How much do you as an architect know about infrastructure—and how much do you think you should know? As we transition from physical systems to virtual machines to containers, the way we build systems is also changing radically, influenced by the new paradigms. James Bottomley explores the relationship between the systems we build and the infrastructure we build them from.

Join us in the Sponsor Pavilion for drinks and food at the Software Architecture Sponsor Pavilion Reception. This will be your first opportunity to network with other Software Architecture attendees, so don’t miss out.

Join other attendees during lunch at Software Architecture to share ideas, talk about the issues of the day, and maybe solve a few. Not sure which topic to pick? Don’t worry—it's not a long-term commitment. Try two or three and settle on a different topic tomorrow.

If you’d like to make new professional connections and hear ideas for supporting diversity in the tech community, come to the diversity and inclusion networking lunch on Tuesday.

Software architects have to practice being software architects. Now is your chance. Network and show your skills by joining Architectural Katas—a team exercise where small groups work together on a project that needs development—on Tuesday evening following the Sponsor Pavilion Reception.

Jumpstart your networking at Software Architecture by coming to Speed Networking before the keynotes begin. Bring your business cards and prepare a minute of patter about yourself, your projects, and your interests.