Build Systems that Drive Business
June 11–12, 2018: Training
June 12–14, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
San Jose, CA

Systems Architecture & Infrastructure

Build and implement large-scale systems

As you adopt new architectures, DevOps principles, and cloud technologies like serverless, how does this change your systems infrastructure? We'll examine serverless concepts, storage systems, and how your applications deal with state management. We'll also explore scaling resources to meet demand, and how network, traffic management, and edge computing and management are key to application performance and latency.

We'll help you solve your toughest challenges with real-world advice from leaders in the field who have grappled with the same problems you're facing today. Like how to:

  • Implement a migration strategy at a massive scale
  • Architect a system to automatically identify and anticipate resource utilization bottlenecks using live traffic
  • Manage secrets on real hardware
  • Improve cache locality and optimize delivery
  • Handle scalability challenges for large distributed systems
9:00am–12:30pm Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Location: LL21 C/D Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Bill Boulden (ClearView Social)
Average rating: **...
(2.40, 10 ratings)
Serverless architectures remove load from web servers and scale flawlessly to handle any volume while keeping you from paying for an instant of wasted idle time. Bill Boulden walks you through creating a functioning serverless API that coexists alongside conventionally served web pages using AWS Lambda and API Gateway. Read more.
1:30pm–5:00pm Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Location: LL21 A/B Level: Beginner
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Bridget Kromhout (Microsoft)
Average rating: ****.
(4.58, 12 ratings)
In this hands-on Kubernetes workshop, Bridget Kromhout walks you through launching clusters and details all the moving parts you need to know about to use Kubernetes in production. Read more.
1:30pm–5:00pm Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Location: LL21 E/F Level: Non-technical
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Michael Brunton-Spall (Bruntonspall Ltd)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 2 ratings)
Traditional security approaches to threat and risk management are highly optimized to work within a traditional software development lifecycle. Michael Brunton-Spall shares a new approach to reviewing systems along with real-life examples to help you prioritize where to focus security efforts and what sorts of security threats you should worry about. Read more.
11:25am–12:05pm Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Location: LL21 E/F Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Scott Wimer (Smartsheet)
Scott Wimer explains how to support the GDPR’s Right to be Forgotten through targeted, secure data destruction. Read more.
11:25am–12:05pm Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Location: LL21 C/D Level: Non-technical
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Astrid Atkinson (Google)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 8 ratings)
Astrid Atkinson shares a microservices-based approach to tackling legacy and heterogeneity at Google. Read more.
1:15pm–1:55pm Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Location: LL21 E/F Level: Beginner
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Neal Mueller (Google)
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 2 ratings)
Google conducted the first longitudinal study of the underground ecosystem fueling credential theft and identified 12.4 million potential victims of phishing kits. Neal Mueller discusses this data and shares phishing demos and recommendations about the effectiveness of phishing prevention tools, including education, antivirus software, filtering, 2FA, password managers, and security keys. Read more.
1:15pm–1:55pm Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Location: 230 B Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Lena Hall (Microsoft)
Average rating: ****.
(4.12, 8 ratings)
Data is generated at an ever-increasing rate, so your architecture for ingesting these incoming influxes of data needs to be flexible, scalable, fast, and resilient. Alena Hall walks you through using distributed systems like Apache Kafka and Spark Streaming to process data coming from multiple sources in real time, do processing, and perform machine learning tasks. Read more.
1:15pm–1:55pm Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Location: LL20 A/B Level: Advanced
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Jeff Poole (Vivint Smart Home)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 2 ratings)
Networking with Docker and Kubernetes is a lot more complex than with traditional servers and virtual machines. Jeff Poole offers an overview of the concepts involved and explains what tuning may be required to use Kubernetes successfully. Read more.
1:15pm–1:55pm Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Location: LL21 C/D Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Brodie Kurczynski (Las Cumbres Observatory)
Brodie Kurczynski shares how Las Cumbres Observatory developed a stateless interface to take real-time observations on a private global telescope network over the internet on a nonprofit budget. Read more.
2:10pm–2:50pm Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Location: LL21 C/D Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Marcel Flores (Verizon Digital Media Services)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)
Marcel Flores explores the design and implementation of Heteractis, the traffic management system Verizon Digital Media Services uses to turn network telemetry data into automated decisions in an automated fashion. Read more.
2:10pm–2:50pm Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Location: 230 B Level: Beginner
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Miro Cupak (DNAstack)
The Beacon Network is the largest search and discovery engine of human genomic data in the world. Miro Cupak details the architecture and technologies behind the system with focus on the technical decisions that allow it to scale and disrupt the perception of genetic data. Read more.
3:40pm–4:20pm Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Location: LL21 C/D Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Bing Wei (Slack)
Average rating: ***..
(3.00, 4 ratings)
In 2016, Slack faced a problem: the load on its backend servers had increased by 1,000x. Bing Wei explains how rearchitecting the system with lazy loading, a publish/subscribe model, and an edge cache service overcame the problem with zero downtime, improved latency, and led to gains in reliability and availability. Read more.
3:40pm–4:20pm Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Location: LL20 A/B Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
David Calavera (Netlify)
Average rating: ***..
(3.00, 3 ratings)
Netlify recently moved a production system to Kubernetes, but the story isn't so simple. David Calavera shares the lessons Netlify learned during the migration that made the company roll the migration back and explains how they rolled it again—all without affecting production availability. Read more.
4:35pm–5:15pm Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Location: LL21 C/D Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 3 ratings)
Rewriting the key software component of your platform from scratch is always intimidating, especially when you guarantee 100% uptime, your platform is in the critical application delivery path, and your environment is highly distributed. Shannon Weyrick discusses NS1's recent DNS server rewrite and the steps the company took to roll it out across its globally distributed network with no downtime. Read more.
10:10am–10:25am Thursday, June 14, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom 220 Level: Beginner
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Nicole Forsgren (GitHub)
Average rating: ****.
(4.83, 12 ratings)
Nicole Forsgren shares results and stories from four years of research to uncover the secrets and surprises of what really makes high-performing technology-driven teams and organizations. Read more.
11:25am–12:05pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
Location: 230 B Level: Advanced
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Mike Roberts (Symphonia)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 2 ratings)
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. Read more.
11:25am–12:05pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
Location: LL21 C/D Level: Beginner
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Seth Vargo (Google)
Average rating: ****.
(4.20, 5 ratings)
Local service discovery and availability is easy, but how do you discover services in other data centers or other cloud providers? Seth Vargo explains how HashiCorp Consul can provide service discovery, monitoring, and failover across many regions and multiple public and private cloud providers. Read more.
1:15pm–1:55pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
Location: 230 B Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Lynn Langit (Lynn Langit Consulting)
Average rating: ****.
(4.67, 3 ratings)
Serverless data access (via SQL and other data query/processing languages such as Spark) is fast becoming the norm. Lynn Langit compares the state of public cloud serverless SQL via AWS Athena, Google Big Query, and others and explores architectural patterns and examples of services for emerging serverless and data lake cloud pipelines. Read more.
2:10pm–2:50pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
Location: 230 B Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Donna Malayeri (Pulumi)
Tooling is necessary for serverless and service-full applications. Donna Malayeri shares a decision framework for choosing infrastructure deployment tools, based on whether you need flexibility and control or simplicity and ease-of-use. You'll learn how to evaluate several popular cloud automation tools, including AWS SAM, Terraform, Chalice, Serverless Framework, and more. Read more.
3:40pm–4:20pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
Location: 230 B Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Soam Vasani (Platform9 Systems), Timirah James (Platform9 Systems)
FaaS functions are great for small functionality but not for complex real-world applications. Soam Vasani and Timirah James explore four available options for composing functions, along with a deep dive into workflows. Read more.
4:35pm–5:15pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
Location: LL21 C/D Level: Beginner
Secondary topics: Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Paul McCallick (Nordstrom)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 7 ratings)
Paul McCallick discusses how and why Nordstrom has moved to an only-production viewpoint, saving countless engineering cycles and putting effort where it matters. Read more.