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

Distributed Systems sessions

Failure is inevitable given the complexity of our systems. This track dives deep into the principles and practices for designing and managing systems that are secure, robust, adaptable, and can recover gracefully from failure.

Track host

Emily Shea (Fastly)Emily Shea (Fastly) is a Senior Software Engineer at Fastly, where she works on the platform for delivering core CDN configurations, and writes Perl. In a past life, she worked in HR at mobile gaming companies. Emily holds a BA in Architecture from UC Berkeley, and in her spare time likes to hang out in parks with her dog, named Chicken.

11:25am–12:05pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
Pat Helland and me: How to build stateful distributed applications that can scale almost infinitely
Location: LL21 A/B Level: Beginner
Secondary topics: Distributed State
Sean Allen (Wallaroo Labs)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 3 ratings)
In 2007, Pat Helland published "Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostate’s Opinion," in which he conducts a thought experiment on how to design a distributed database that can scale almost infinitely. While the paper explicitly addresses distributed database design, Sean Allen shows that the ideas are far more widely applicable, particularly in scaling stateful applications. Read more.
1:15pm–1:55pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
The distributed authorization system: A Netflix case study
Location: LL21 A/B Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics: Resilient, Performant & Secure Distributed Systems
Manish Mehta (Netflix), Torin Sandall (Open Policy Agent Project)
Average rating: ****.
(4.33, 6 ratings)
Manish Mehta and Torin Sandall lead a deep dive into how Netflix enforces authorization policies (“who can do what”) at scale in its microservices ecosystem in a public cloud without introducing unreasonable latency in the request path. Read more.
2:10pm–2:50pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
Performance debugging: Finding bottlenecks in distributed systems
Location: LL21 A/B Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics: Resilient, Performant & Secure Distributed Systems
Christian Grabowski (NS1)
Average rating: **...
(2.50, 8 ratings)
Performance debugging is a crucial part of ensuring code is production ready, particularly as a company and its products grow. However, bottlenecks that hold these services back can be hard to identify. Christian Grabowski shares his experience debugging bottlenecks in distributed systems, at both a macro (metrics, distributed tracing) and a micro (user space and kernel space profiling) level. Read more.
3:40pm–4:20pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
Improving performance with Tesser
Location: LL21 A/B Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics: Resilient, Performant & Secure Distributed Systems
Kyle Kingsbury (Jepsen)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 3 ratings)
Kyle Kingsbury offers an overview of Tesser, a Clojure library for writing commutative, parallel folds that can be chained and composed into complex single-pass reductions that are dramatically faster on multicore systems and can be transparently distributed over Hadoop. Read more.
4:35pm–5:15pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
Isolation without containers
Location: LL21 A/B
Tyler McMullen (Fastly)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)
Tyler McMullen offers an overview of sandboxing compilers, which provide important benefits but are also challenging to make both safe and fast. Tyler covers machine code generation and optimization, trap handling, and memory sandboxing and illustrates how to integrate them into an existing system—all based on a real compiler and sandbox, currently in development. Read more.