Schedule

Technical debt is a funny thing. It's the name we give engineering decisions we disagree with. Robert (r0ml) Lefkowitz leads a deep dive into technical debt—what it is, how to prevent it, and how to reduce it.

The New York Times sends nearly 4 billion emails per year and push notifications to 50 million devices. Recently, the messaging team replatformed the entire service that supports emails and push notifications. Katerina Iliakopoulou shares the journey from retiring the legacy systems used for sending emails and push notifications at the Times to a new, stable, and highly scalable platform.

James Gough and Matthew Auburn investigate all things API gateway, including architecture, use cases, anti-patterns, and most importantly how to avoid catastrophic production problems. They set up scenario demonstrations to show the worst kind of failures, how they manifest, and how the use of effective testing and chaos engineering can help avoid potential disaster.

Patterns are an excellent way of building knowledge of an architectural style. And as serverless starts to mature, we start to see patterns emerge. Mike Roberts introduces you to some of these patterns and helps you look for them in your own organizations.

When you balance emergent changes created by Agile teams with strategic intentional architecture, you can foster a sustainable ecosystem in a mature (post–startup phase) organization. Nimisha Asthagiri shares her experiences bringing an organically built monolithic open source system to a more intentionally maintained platform using leading architectural principles and practices.

Adopting a microservices architecture can present new challenges in observability, networking, and security. Megan O'Keefe explores how Istio, an open source service mesh tool, can help you solve these challenges by providing a unified management layer for your services. Through demos, you'll learn how to use Istio to route traffic, automate security policies, and monitor services at scale.

We're all familiar with the title software architect, but you may not know what a software architect does or how to become one. Perhaps someone even gave you the title, but you're not sure what’s expected of you. Or you suspect you might be doing a job of a software architect, but can’t pinpoint when or explain how you made the leap. Join Sonya Natanzon to explore the role in depth.

John Chapin explains how—in this brave new world of managed services and platforms—you can use serverless technologies and an infrastructure-as-code mind-set to architect, build, and operate resilient systems that survive even massive vendor outages.

Digital transformation means adapting an organization's strategy and structure to capture opportunities enabled by digital technology. APIs are the connective fabric that's essential as a foundation for digital transformation. Erik Wilde explains why having an API strategy and executing it through an API program is a good way to get the most out of your digital transformation initiatives.

Rob Cameron and Lisa-Marie Namphy explain how containers are keeping your kids happy. Roblox maintains availability and performance of a platform used by over 90 million gamers each month. Kids and teens all over the world create the games, and little did they know, they're all container experts. (Or at least, their games are in good hands because of containers.)

Maggie Carroll teaches you how to develop influence through relationship building and a tool for moving from a fire-fighting mode to proactive ownership, which she created as an enterprise architect. She also shares useful skills and actionable techniques for creating a new enterprise architecture function and a tool for remaining productive as a leader.

The shift to cloud computing involves a veritable plethora of new technologies and approaches. From the 12 factors to domain-drive design, change is afoot. Your organization is knee-deep in functions and platforms and containers, and while the technology is important, you can’t afford to overlook the importance of culture. Nathaniel Schutta examines what changes when you go to the cloud.

In early 2019, Cortico and the MIT Media Lab deployed the digital hearth, a device designed to stimulate in-person conversations and bridge political divides, into communities throughout the US. Wes Chow outlines the industrial design of the system, its software system for remote operation, and the speech-to-text and machine learning pipeline used to analyze hundreds of hours of speech.

When designing an identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) platform for developers, you must consider aspects such as developer experience, security, reliability, and latency while also preventing breaking changes and API abuse, among other things. Damian Schenkelman explains how Auth0's architecture evolved to support its customer base and team growing ~2x year over year.

When your mobile phone is in silent or vibrate mode, are you using an accessibility feature or a phone feature? If you’ve adjusted the size of onscreen content by pinching or stretching, do you have a disability or are you using your phone as it was meant to be used? Scott Davis explores universal design, where features are designed for everyone to use, not just an arbitrary subset of users.

Mike Amundsen demonstrates how to use the STAR method (stabilize, transform, add, and repeat) to safely and effectively migrate your existing IT infrastructure to a microservice platform—all without interrupting your current IT services.

While the rest of the software architecture world is admiring their containers, edge computing, and cloud native architecture, game developers are off in the corner creating entity component system (ECS)-based architectures and pushing the boundaries with this flexible, compatible, composable approach. Paris Buttfield-Addison, Mars Geldard, and Tim Nugent explain why it's not just for games.

In his time designing and deploying large-scale data lakes and distributed systems, Jesus Jackson has learned many hard truths and discovered many myths. Join in to hear some of these myths, lessons learned, and war stories.

As applications have increased in complexity, so have the queries needed to understand the state and performance of those systems, leading to an explosion in the volume and dimensionality of metrics. Joel Barciauskas outlines how Datadog architected its pipelines, data structures, and storage engines to answer these complex questions, all while scaling to ingest trillions of points per day.

Since the mid-1980s, relational databases have been standard for most applications to store and query structured data. As architectures became more complex, databases generalized to fit a variety of use cases. Simplicity was key: storage, indexing, caching, querying, and transaction management, all under a unified SQL. Alex Silva examines how relational databases overcome these challenges.

The cloud era has brought with it great efficiencies in operations, software release cadence, and speed of integration of new functions. In this talk, we'll look at each of these pressures on software and cloud architects and discuss a holistic view of cloud architecture, suited to the next wave of application modernization across industries.

The Operator Framework combines Red Hat's latest best practices for the development, installation, and management of platform extensions and enhancements for Kubernetes. Ryan Jarvinen provides you with architectural overviews, implementation notes, and a few popular Operator-based solutions available today.

Continuous delivery requires that we're able to deploy broken code into production without negatively affecting anyone. Heidi Waterhouse explains how to adopt this continuous delivery mind-set in yourself and in your teams.

As engineers, we often find ourselves maintaining systems that are full of things outside our control but for which we're nevertheless held responsible. Big or small, these deep systems present significant engineering and operational challenges. Join Austin Parker to learn how to identify your deep systems—along with some techniques to manage them.

Simone Sassoli outlines how to automate complex data-centric app pipelines, including big data, NoSQL, RDBMS, and more with one click (on-premises or on any cloud) so your software teams can focus on app development rather than infrastructure. You'll learn how to use infrastructure and topology-aware technology to accelerate deployment and optimize utilization.

You've been misled about having to choose which *aaS platform to use to host your cloud native applications. Now you can get all of the key features in one platform with Knative. Doug Davis explains what Knative is and how it lets your devs get back to coding, not managing infrastructure.

Getting identity right in your architecture can be very, very tricky. Vittorio Bertocci walks you through through common mistakes in identity solutions. From the costs of ignoring best practices to cautionary tales of unintended consequences, you'll learn how to avoid costly mistakes and successfully tackle identity challenges in your architecture.

Implementing a feature flag platform across services is hard in both theory and practice. Asa Schachar breaks down how to settle on the right architecture, decide on the interfaces, and perform QA and shares some common gotchas you'll encounter along the way. Join in to learn how to go from an unreliable simple system to a scalable, maintainable, and powerful feature flagging platform.

Software architects have to practice being software architects. Now's 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.

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

Being a developer in today’s world means living and breathing technology, whether it's designing new systems or critiquing the design of your doctor’s scheduling web app (if they have one, that is). In the few moments in between, there isn’t time for much else. Sometimes Kai Holnes draws; sometimes she writes. What do you do?

As the use of cloud expands from initial use cases to broader consumption, new interdisciplinary interlock across software development, cloud architecture, and data architecture are required. In this keynote, we'll touch on key pain points of this inter-disciplinary era and look at the view of holistic cloud architecture and development.

In the many architectural assessments Martin Fowler's colleagues do in enterprises throughout the world, they commonly find one widely neglected architectural attribute. He doesn't claim that its identity will shock you, but it does fuel his venting for 20 minutes.

In this ongoing series, Neal Ford interviews highly regarded industry professionals about their career path and their work as an architect. Join us for his discussion with Rachel Laycock.

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

Join us in the Expo Hall for drinks and food at the Expo Hall Reception.

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

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