Engineering the Future of Software
Feb 3–4, 2019: Training
Feb 4–6, 2019: Tutorials & Conference
New York, NY

Schedule: Best Practice sessions

Add to your personal schedule
9:00am–12:30pm Monday, February 4, 2019
Microservices
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Matthew McLarty (MuleSoft)
Average rating: ****.
(4.64, 14 ratings)
Matt McLarty introduces Microservice-Based Enterprise Transformation Architecture (META), a holistic approach organizations can use to ensure their microservices migration delivers its intended benefits. META addresses the technological, operational, methodological, and cultural aspects of the migration effort. Along the way, you'll explore the Microservice Design Canvas and other artifacts. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
9:00am–12:30pm Monday, February 4, 2019
DevOps & Continuous Delivery
Location: Sutton North
John Chapin (Symphonia)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 3 ratings)
With systems like Travis CI, Circle CI, and CodeBuild, we're never more than a few lines of YAML away from a complete continuous delivery pipeline. However, ephemeral build systems constantly recreate the world from scratch, increasing build time and lengthening the CD feedback loop. John Chapin addresses those challenges and shares a reference pipeline using AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
1:30pm–5:00pm Monday, February 4, 2019
Leadership skills
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Seth Dobbs (Bounteous)
Average rating: ****.
(4.73, 15 ratings)
As more companies embrace digital technology as core to their operation, it's essential that we architects develop our leadership skills to be equal to our technical skills. Join Seth Dobbs to learn how to guide business decisions and align technology with broad strategy while also motivating your teams and ensuring their success. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
10:45am–12:15pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Fundamentals
Location: Trianon Ballroom
James Thompson (Mavenlink)
Average rating: ***..
(3.52, 27 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
10:45am–12:15pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Containers & Containers Orchestration
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Average rating: ***..
(3.60, 10 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
10:45am–12:15pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Serverless
Location: Sutton Center/Sutton South
John Chapin (Symphonia)
Average rating: ****.
(4.57, 7 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
10:45am–12:15pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Application architecture
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Ruth Malan (Bredemeyer Consulting)
Average rating: **...
(2.22, 18 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
1:15pm–2:05pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
DevOps & Continuous Delivery
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Maria Gomez (BCG Digital Ventures)
Average rating: **...
(2.00, 2 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
1:15pm–2:05pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Containers & Containers Orchestration
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Aaron Schlesinger (Microsoft)
Average rating: ****.
(4.85, 13 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
2:15pm–3:05pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Security
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Eoin Woods (Endava)
Average rating: ****.
(4.75, 12 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
2:15pm–3:05pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Microservices
Location: Sutton Center/Sutton South
James Thompson (Mavenlink)
Average rating: ***..
(3.29, 7 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
2:15pm–3:05pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Microservices
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Mason Jones (Credit Karma)
Average rating: ****.
(4.35, 17 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
2:15pm–3:05pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Enterprise architecture
Location: Trianon Ballroom
Jonny LeRoy (ThoughtWorks)
Average rating: ****.
(4.12, 16 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
3:50pm–4:40pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Containers & Containers Orchestration
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Arun Gupta (Amazon Web Services)
Average rating: ****.
(4.43, 7 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
3:50pm–4:40pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Distributed systems
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Premanand Chandrasekaran (Barclays US)
Average rating: ****.
(4.58, 19 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
4:50pm–5:40pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
DevOps & Continuous Delivery
Location: Trianon Ballroom
Vasanth Asokan (Netflix)
Average rating: ****.
(4.26, 23 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
4:50pm–5:40pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Security
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Izar Tarandach (Autodesk)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 5 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
4:50pm–5:40pm Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Microservices
Location: Sutton North
Irakli Nadareishvili (Capital One), Raji Chockaiyan (Capital One)
Average rating: ***..
(3.71, 7 ratings)
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. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
10:45am–12:15pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Integration architecture
Location: Trianon Ballroom
Marc Siegel (Panorama Education)
Average rating: ****.
(4.12, 8 ratings)
Have you ever launched a large ETL job to check a fix for a corner case in a derived calculation or normalization? Marc Siegel shares lessons learned applying the event sourcing pattern within an ETL pipeline. Key takeaway in regex form: E{1}T*L* -- that is, "Extract once, transform and load infinite times." Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
10:45am–12:15pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Application architecture
Location: Mercury Ballroom
r0ml Lefkowitz (Retired)
Average rating: ****.
(4.83, 46 ratings)
Robert Lefkowitz offers an overview of technical debt, explaining how to recognize it, how to prevent or reduce it, and why there is so much of it. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
10:45am–12:15pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Microservices
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Allen Holub (Holub Associates)
Average rating: ****.
(4.32, 22 ratings)
Allen Holub covers the ins and outs of choreographed microservice systems in depth, looking at everything from architecture and implementation details to design techniques. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
1:15pm–2:05pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Enterprise architecture
Location: Sutton Center/Sutton South
Diana Montalion (Mentrix Group)
Average rating: ***..
(3.14, 7 ratings)
Modern content "management" systems are as conceptually challenging as they are technically difficult. Architecting them isn’t (strictly) AWS configuring or software solutioning now. The work requires an evolution from strategic planning to collaborative strategic thinking. Diana Montalion explores "archistructure": enabling everyone to engage with the parts through the lens of the whole. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
1:15pm–2:05pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Enterprise architecture
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Eben Hewitt (Sabre)
Average rating: ***..
(3.65, 17 ratings)
Eben Hewitt shares a holistic approach to enterprise architecture that explains how to bring business architecture, information architecture, data architecture, application architecture, and infrastructure architecture together into a comprehensive design. You'll also learn how to incorporate design thinking principles and work effectively with Agile teams. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
2:15pm–3:05pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Chaos engineering
Location: Sutton Center/Sutton South
Tyler Lund (Audible.com)
Average rating: ****.
(4.45, 11 ratings)
Audible.com delivers millions of hours of audio content daily across a range of mobile apps and devices. As the company has grown, it has had to quickly scale to meet demand and provide the best experience for its customers. Tyler Lund explains how Audible's audio delivery and playback architectures have evolved and how the company utilizes chaos engineering at scale to improve reliability. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
2:15pm–3:05pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Fundamentals
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Patrick Kua (N26)
Average rating: ****.
(4.62, 24 ratings)
Being a successful architect requires more than just a good understanding of architecture. Patrick Kua explores the breadth of skills and experience an architect should focus on and outlines the balance of traits that makes a well-rounded architect. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
2:15pm–3:05pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Cloud native
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Daniel Bryant (Datawire)
Average rating: ****.
(4.33, 9 ratings)
Many organizations are embracing cloud-native technologies, such as microservices, containers, and Kubernetes, but are struggling to adapt their developer experience (DevEx or DX) and continuous delivery processes. Join Daniel Bryant to dive into the core concepts of DevEx, learn why architects should care, and explore lessons learned from the trenches. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
2:15pm–3:05pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Cloud native
Location: Trianon Ballroom
f70456a3 5efec66b (Confluent)
Average rating: ***..
(3.67, 6 ratings)
Stream processing and serverless functions are closely related, yet the technologies that back them have very different properties. Ben Stopford explores how the serverless applications of the future will blend stream processing, event storage, and stateless functions to tackle a far richer range of use cases with better performance, correctness, and observability than those available today. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
3:50pm–4:40pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Application architecture
Location: Trianon Ballroom
Average rating: ***..
(3.62, 13 ratings)
Microservices provide a way to break up a monolithic architecture into multiple atomic units, allowing an independent scalability of a service. They also provide a better way to divide the domains across multiple teams. Luca Mezzalira explains how to apply the same principles to frontend applications, enabling you to scale up a project with tens of developers without reducing the throughput. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
3:50pm–4:40pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Leadership skills
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Seth Dobbs (Bounteous)
Average rating: ****.
(4.82, 17 ratings)
As architects, we provide guiding principles as part of our architecture to enable decision making for unforeseen details, but we seldom develop guiding principles for ourselves as leaders and for how we interact with people. Seth Dobbs shares a core set of principles that will help you enable effective interactions with your team and your stakeholders. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
3:50pm–4:40pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Enterprise architecture
Location: Sutton Center/Sutton South
Jonathan Moore (Comcast Cable)
Average rating: ****.
(4.70, 10 ratings)
How can a large software organization strike a balance between gaining leverage from the use of common technologies and empowering teams to make their own decisions? Jon Moore outlines the Architecture Guild framework Comcast uses to try to thread this needle. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
3:50pm–4:40pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Chaos engineering
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Subbu Allamaraju (Expedia Group)
Average rating: ***..
(3.33, 6 ratings)
How do you bring safety back into an organizational culture when the contemporary patterns used to increase the rate of change also contribute to increased fragility? Subbu Allamaraju examines contributing factors, the limits of chaos testing, and patterns and practices needed to support a high rate of change while also maintaining system safety. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
4:50pm–5:40pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Data
Location: Trianon Ballroom
Barbara Eckman (Comcast)
Average rating: ****.
(4.75, 4 ratings)
Comcast is evolving a cloud-based data infrastructure to support classic analytic use cases, real-time operational analysis, and modern machine learning. All these use cases require finding high-quality data of interest, understanding its semantics, and tracing its route from streaming ingestion to at-rest storage. Barbara Eckman explains how a judicious data governance strategy fills these needs. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
4:50pm–5:40pm Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Fundamentals
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Pepijn van de Kamp (SIG), Luc Brandts (Software Improvement Group)
Average rating: ***..
(3.80, 5 ratings)
Great architectures are not just about software but also about the people that create it. Traces of how people collaborate during the creation of software systems are captured in data sources like version control history, source code, and ticketing systems. Luc Brandts and Pepijn van de Kamp explain how analyzing this data provides valuable insights and input for your architectural strategy. Read more.