Engineer for the future of Cloud
June 10-13, 2019
San Jose, CA

LL20 A/B
Add Your team as a distributed system to your personal schedule
1:25pm Your team as a distributed system Andrew Harvey (Microsoft)
Add Navigating the midcareer plateau to your personal schedule
2:20pm Navigating the midcareer plateau Uma Chingunde (Stripe)
Add Why should I care about DevRel anyway? to your personal schedule
3:50pm Why should I care about DevRel anyway? Emily Freeman (Microsoft), Nicole Forsgren (GitHub)
Add ZOMG I’m leading a project? to your personal schedule
4:45pm ZOMG I’m leading a project? Jonathan Maltz (Nuna)
LL21 A/B
Add Layers to your personal schedule
11:35am Layers Kyle Anderson (Yelp)
Add How Lyft migrated to a service mesh with Envoy to your personal schedule
2:20pm How Lyft migrated to a service mesh with Envoy Daniel Hochman (Lyft), Jose Nino (Lyft)
LL21 C/D
Add Test in production: Yes, you can (and you should) to your personal schedule
1:25pm Test in production: Yes, you can (and you should) Charity Majors (Honeycomb)
LL21 E/F
Add Immersive development to your personal schedule
11:35am Immersive development John Voorhees (Primitive)
Add Build HQ Trivia (better than HQ) to your personal schedule
1:25pm Build HQ Trivia (better than HQ) Steve Heffernan (Mux)
Add Deepfakes: If anything can be real, then nothing is real to your personal schedule
2:20pm Deepfakes: If anything can be real, then nothing is real April Wright (Architect Security, Inc.)
230 A
Add Serverless architecture for data science to your personal schedule
1:25pm Serverless architecture for data science Rustem Feyzkhanov (Instrumental)
Add Isolate computing to your personal schedule
3:50pm Isolate computing Zack Bloom (Cloudflare)
Add The Ops in the Serverless to your personal schedule
4:45pm The Ops in the Serverless Jennifer Davis (Microsoft)
Expo Session
Add Chaos engineering: When the network breaks to your personal schedule
2:10pm Chaos engineering: When the network breaks Kolton Andrus (Gremlin)
LL20 C
LL20 D
Add Thursday opening welcome to your personal schedule
Grand Ballroom 220
9:00am Thursday opening welcome Nikki McDonald (O’Reilly Media), Ines Sombra (Fastly), James Turnbull (Glitch)
Add Cultivating production excellence to your personal schedule
9:05am Cultivating production excellence Liz Fong-Jones (Honeycomb)
Add How do we heal? to your personal schedule
9:40am How do we heal? Alex Qin (Code Cooperative)
Add Kubernetes for the Impatient to your personal schedule
10:30am Kubernetes for the Impatient Bridget Kromhout (Microsoft)
2:05pm Session Transition
4:30pm Session Transition
11:00am Morning Break | Room: Expo Hall
Add Lunch and Thursday Topic Tables to your personal schedule
12:15pm Lunch and Thursday Topic Tables | Room: Expo Hall
3:00pm Afternoon Break | Room: Expo Hall
8:00am Morning Coffee | Room: Grand Ballroom Foyer
Add Thursday Speed Networking to your personal schedule
8:15am Thursday Speed Networking | Room: Grand Ballroom Foyer
8:45am space saver
11:35am-12:15pm (40m) Leadership
Having the bubble: How your experts build, maintain, and spread deep system knowledge
Beth Long (New Relic)
We fret about how to break system knowledge out of knowledge silos—the expert individuals with a deep intuitive understanding of our complex systems. Beth Long explains how those experts represent both a vulnerability and a strength and why understanding them as a key mechanism in your larger systems helps you harness their power and protect against fragility.
1:25pm-2:05pm (40m) Leadership
Your team as a distributed system
Andrew Harvey (Microsoft)
Many technical leaders find themselves in leadership without any formal training. Andrew Harvey asks, What if you used your understanding of distributed systems to understand your team and how to scale it?
2:20pm-3:00pm (40m) Leadership
Navigating the midcareer plateau
Uma Chingunde (Stripe)
As both engineers and managers reach midcareer levels referred to as career or terminal levels (e.g., senior engineer or senior manager levels in many technology companies), they are often faced with uncertainty and ambiguity on possible next steps in their career. Uma Chingunde focuses on career planning and strategy for midcareer technologists.
3:50pm-4:30pm (40m) Leadership
Why should I care about DevRel anyway?
Emily Freeman (Microsoft), Nicole Forsgren (GitHub)
Emily Freeman and Nicole Forsgren dive into what the heck DevRel is and why you (yes, you) are actually a DevRel too—whether you know it or not. You’ll walk away from this game show—talk, that is—with a smile on your face and a deeper understanding of the ins and outs of technical advocacy and how developer relations benefit you as an engineer.
4:45pm-5:25pm (40m) Leadership
ZOMG I’m leading a project?
Jonathan Maltz (Nuna)
Leading a project requires reorienting your priorities in new and sometimes unintuitive ways; Jonathan Maltz explains how your responsibilities change when you start leading a project and how you can successfully adapt to that change.
11:35am-12:15pm (40m) Building Cloud Native Systems
Layers
Kyle Anderson (Yelp)
Are we building the right abstraction layers? And how would we know? To answer these questions, Kyle Anderson looks at the past, present, and future of the abstraction layers we've built as an industry.
1:25pm-2:05pm (40m) Building Cloud Native Systems
How embracing unreliability can make infrastructure reliable and cost-effective
Osman Sarood (Mist Systems)
Server faults are a reality. While public cloud vendors try to improve hardware reliability, software should play its part by being resilient to server failures. Mist consumes TBs of telemetry data daily to do machine learning. Osman Sarood explains how the company is running 80% of its production infrastructure, reliably, on AWS Spot Instances while keeping annual costs to $2 million.
2:20pm-3:00pm (40m) Building Cloud Native Systems
How Lyft migrated to a service mesh with Envoy
Daniel Hochman (Lyft), Jose Nino (Lyft)
Lyft has made the transition from a single monolithic service to 300+ microservices by leveraging Lyft's open source proxy Envoy. Daniel Hochman and Jose Nino explain how Lyft migrated from a legacy monolithic application to over 300 microservices while keeping drivers, passengers, and developers happy.
3:50pm-4:30pm (40m) Building Cloud Native Systems
Teaching old dogs new tricks: Infrastructure as a product
Heather Martin (Discover)
Ent infrastructure is unpredictable, and being agile means working harder and faster to complete project after project to keep the business moving forward. You do very little to improve the solutions you provide to your customers, and this model just doesn't scale. Heather Martin describes the journey of moving from a project to a product mind-set to transform how we deliver infrastructure.
4:45pm-5:25pm (40m) Building Cloud Native Systems
Cloud native storage behind the biggest 1-day shopping event in the world
Alex Chen (Alibaba Cloud)
On November 11, 2018, more than $30.5B of goods from over 180 thousand brands were sold in one day through one platform, with peak message requests of 1.72B per second. Alex Chen details Alibaba's cloud storage infrastructure that supports this level of data velocity, variety, and volume.
11:35am-12:15pm (40m) Production Engineering, SRE, and DevOps
Learning from failure: Why a total site outage can be a good thing
Alex Elman (Indeed)
Alex Elman explains how Indeed used a site-wide outage as an opportunity to build resilience, improve reliability, and make lasting improvements to the engineering culture.
1:25pm-2:05pm (40m) Production Engineering, SRE, and DevOps
Test in production: Yes, you can (and you should)
Charity Majors (Honeycomb)
Charity Majors explains why the only environment that matters is production. For the good of humanity, ditch the rest.
2:20pm-3:00pm (40m) Production Engineering, SRE, and DevOps
Lowering costs of coordination during service outages: A multiple case analysis
Laura Maguire (The Ohio State University)
DevOps squads coordinate in almost every aspect of their work. Laura Maguire explores how high-performing teams responding to service outages demonstrate sophisticated, nuanced practices that ease the cognitive burden of coping with complex, time-pressured incidents.
3:50pm-4:30pm (40m) Production Engineering, SRE, and DevOps
Scaling SRE organizations: The journey from 1 to many teams
Gustavo Franco (Google)
A lot has been said about the SRE profession (how to start an SRE team, how to scale a single team in place, etc.), but how to move from a single SRE team to an SRE organization that requires several teams has been largely unexplored. Gustavo Franco takes new SRE leaders and individual contributors through what it takes to be a part of or start their second team and beyond.
4:45pm-5:25pm (40m) Production Engineering, SRE, and DevOps
Product management and DevOps, together at last and kicking butt
James Heimbuck (SendGrid)
DevOps and platform teams have too many projects, not enough time, and users who can easily ask if the thing is done, because "it's really holding them up." James Heimbuck explores the good, the bad, and the ugly of how SendGrid incorporates product management practices into planning and execution within DevOps and platform teams to cut off scope creep and never-ending projects and realize value.
11:35am-12:15pm (40m) Emerging Tech
Immersive development
John Voorhees (Primitive)
Almost all science fiction representations of the future involve some version of an immersive, holographic interface with technology. The aspiration at the heart of this vision is that working with technology will one day become an extension of our existing visual, tactile understanding. John Voorhees discusses using virtual reality to connect developers in a spatial representation of code.
1:25pm-2:05pm (40m) Emerging Tech
Build HQ Trivia (better than HQ)
Steve Heffernan (Mux)
Streaming live video at low latency with user interaction laid on top is hard. Steve Heffernan explains how to make it a lot easier with standards-based approaches and existing network technology.
2:20pm-3:00pm (40m) Emerging Tech
Deepfakes: If anything can be real, then nothing is real
April Wright (Architect Security, Inc.)
April Wright explores the possible ramifications of deepfakes, from privacy violations to personal and professional embarrassment to causing global thermonuclear war, and considers what can be done to protect ourselves—emphasizing the need for remaining critical of what we see as this technology gets better and better.
3:50pm-4:30pm (40m) Emerging Tech
Ghost in the machine: The unintended consequences of bias in machine learning
Nivia Henry (Spotify)
Machine learning bias comes from our lack of understanding our own biases. Nivia Henry puts that into focus and offers practical solutions to mitigate such biases.
4:45pm-5:25pm (40m) Emerging Tech
How to adopt cloud native machine learning with Kubernetes and Kubeflow
David Aronchick (Microsoft)
Using Kubernetes and Kubeflow, David Aronchick shows how every company, no matter how technical, can use sophisticated machine learning (ML) solutions to transform their businesses while taking advantage of the reliability and portability that cloud native applications can provide.
11:35am-12:15pm (40m) Serverless
Building serverless solutions that are resilient, scalable, and cost effective
Ruth Yakubu (Microsoft)
Ruth Yakubu explores end-to-end serverless scenarios on Microsoft Azure Functions, Azure Cosmos DB, and Event Grid.
1:25pm-2:05pm (40m) Serverless
Serverless architecture for data science
Rustem Feyzkhanov (Instrumental)
Machine and deep learning become more and more essential for a lot of businesses for internal and external use. One of the main issues with deployment is finding right way to operationalize model within the company. Serverless approach for deep learning provides cheap, simple, scalable and reliable architecture for it. My presentation will show you how to do so within popular AWS infrastructure.
2:20pm-3:00pm (40m) Serverless
Processing metrics with Golang and AWS Lambda
Ryan Neal (Netlify)
AWS Lambda and Golang are really powerful but difficult to use. Netlify uses both to process over 20 million events every hour. Ryan Neal shares a template project that lets you deploy a function and discusses gotchas he encountered while running it in production.
3:50pm-4:30pm (40m) Serverless
Isolate computing
Zack Bloom (Cloudflare)
The technology invented for web browsers is a much better way of running serverless code than traditional processes and containers. Let Zack Bloom show you why.
4:45pm-5:25pm (40m) Serverless
The Ops in the Serverless
Jennifer Davis (Microsoft)
Examining the increased need for specialized Operations Engineering in the Age of Serverless
11:00am-11:45am (45m) Overcoming Obstacles: Lessons in Resilience
Serverless for satellite imagery processing pipelines
The growing number of commercial and open source satellite imagery datasets is enabling remote sensing data for industrial applications. Alex Kudriashova walks you through designing and building an entire processing infrastructure and discusses its challenges, like infrastructure scalability, large frame size, data accessibility and latency, and cross-calibration between the data sources.
1:15pm-2:00pm (45m) Overcoming Obstacles: Lessons in Resilience
How I failed to build a runbook automation system and what I learned
Tim Bonci (Vistaprint)
You're going to automate all the things, reduce toil, and make your systems smarter and recover automatically. . .except sometimes you're automating a house of cards built on the back of individual people and a well-meaning solution can fail to address the true problems in the system. Tim Bonci offers a postmortem of a solution that was designed to solve a common operational problem but failed.
2:10pm-2:55pm (45m) Overcoming Obstacles: Lessons in Resilience
Chaos engineering: When the network breaks
Kolton Andrus (Gremlin)
Join Tammy Butow to learn how to use chaos engineering to accelerate your understanding of how your network can break (packet loss, black hole attacks, latency injection, and packet corruption) and impact your services.
3:05pm-3:50pm (45m) Overcoming Obstacles: Lessons in Resilience
Testing microservices with consumer-driven contracts
Testing microservices can be hard, as often they’re coupled together through APIs or messaging. This can lead to too much reliance on slow end-to-end testing or unreliable unit tests caused by inaccurate stubs of other microservices. Andrew Morgan introduces the consumer-driven contract testing technique, a TDD at the API level approach for microservices that aims to mitigate these problems.
11:35am-12:15pm (40m) Sponsored
Build a backend with TypeScript using Nest.js (sponsored by Square)
Richard Moot (Square)
TypeScript is overtaking the JavaScript world. Nest.js is a progressive Node.js framework for building efficient, reliable, and scalable server-side applications using TypeScript. It's modular, testable, and very similar in structure to Angular but built for backends. Richard Moot covers how Nest.js makes things better when building a TypeScript app.
1:25pm-2:05pm (40m) Sponsored
Scale data access with app layer caching (sponsored by Salesforce)
Anil Jacob (Salesforce)
Databases are costly but critical for application health. Protecting them allows applications to scale with demand, reducing both hardware dependency and costs. Anil Jacob explains how to use application layer caching to cushion shared resources when there are frequent requests for data that doesn't change often, enabling businesses to scale well, provide good user experience, and reduce costs.
11:35am-12:15pm (40m) Sponsored
Katalog-sync: Reliable integration of Consul and Kubernetes (sponsored by Wish)
Thomas Jackson (Wish)
Consul is a well-known and widely used service discovery mechanism. Although Kubernetes has a built-in service discovery mechanism, Wish has standardized on using Consul. Thomas Jackson explains how Wish is leveraging Kubernetes and integrating it with its infrastructure.
9:00am-9:05am (5m)
Thursday opening welcome
Nikki McDonald (O’Reilly Media), Ines Sombra (Fastly), James Turnbull (Glitch)
Program chairs Nikki McDonald, Ines Sombra, and James Turnbull open the second day of keynotes.
9:05am-9:30am (25m)
Cultivating production excellence
Liz Fong-Jones (Honeycomb)
Join Liz Fong-Jones to explore several practices core to production excellence: giving everyone a stake in production, collaborating to ensure observability, measuring with service level objectives, and prioritizing improvements using risk analysis.
9:30am-9:40am (10m) Sponsored
The cloud native elephant in the room (sponsored by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)
Bob Quillin (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)
While cloud native appears to be on a winning streak, there are too many enterprise development teams being left behind. Bob Quillin outlines how the cloud native community can create a more open multicloud future, reduce complexity (rather than piling more on), and be more inclusive to all teams—modern and traditional, startups and enterprises alike.
9:40am-10:05am (25m)
How do we heal?
Alex Qin (Code Cooperative)
We've been working to foster a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable tech industry for years, but we have yet to see meaningful and lasting change. Drawing inspiration from restorative justice practices and her own journey of healing, Alex Qin offers a hopeful vision for how we can come together and cocreate the world we yearn for.
10:05am-10:30am (25m)
Infrastructure first: Because solving complex problems needs more than technology
Everett Harper (Truss)
Drawing from work in technology, community development finance, social psychology, complexity theory, and championship sports, Everett Harper moves to the edge of these disciplines, centering on the key practices that are crucial for solving our most critical challenges.
10:30am-10:55am (25m)
Kubernetes for the Impatient
Bridget Kromhout (Microsoft)
Everyone keeps telling you that containers need orchestration, but you're not so sure; maybe they could go for some light jazz? Or maybe serverless is here to save us from the tyranny of (virtual) machines, but meanwhile somebody's gotta kuber some netes, and it's likely to be you.
10:55am-11:00am (5m)
Thursday closing remarks
Program chairs Ines Sombra, Nikki McDonald, and James Turnbull close the second day of keynotes.
2:05pm-2:20pm (15m)
Plenary: Session Transition
4:30pm-4:45pm (15m)
Plenary: Session Transition
11:00am-11:35am (35m)
Break: Morning Break
12:15pm-1:25pm (1h 10m)
Lunch and Thursday Topic Tables
Join other attendees during lunch at Velocity 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.
3:00pm-3:50pm (50m)
Break: Afternoon Break
8:00am-9:00am (1h)
Break: Morning Coffee
8:15am-8:45am (30m)
Thursday Speed Networking
Jumpstart your networking at Velocity 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.
8:45am-9:00am (15m)
Plenary: space saver