Build & maintain complex distributed systems
October 1–2, 2017: Training
October 2–4, 2017: Tutorials & Conference
New York, NY

Operating microservices: Everything is at scale.

Sarah Wells (Financial Times)
3:50pm4:30pm Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Average rating: ****.
(4.86, 7 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

  • Senior developers, architects, and principal engineers

Prerequisite knowledge

  • Familiarity with the challenges of operating a system
  • A basic understanding of microservices

What you'll learn

  • Understand why microservices present a scale challenge

Description

If you only have to do things a few times, you can do them manually. With microservices, you need to automate pretty much everything. Doing it manually just takes too long. And it’s not just deployment pipelines. How do you keep service run books up to date for 100+ services or avoid being woken up overnight multiple times a week when you’re running millions of checks a day? Networks go wrong all the time.

Sarah Wells explains why, when you have 100+ services, everything needs to be automated and shares tips and lessons learned from building and running a microservices-based system from scratch.

Topics include:

  • Provisioning and deployment: How easily can you add a new step into your deployment pipeline for all your services?
  • Monitoring and alerting: How can you keep the noise to a minimum?
  • Logging: How can you find the information that matters to you?
  • Service documentation: How do you avoid spending all your time updating run books and README files?
Photo of Sarah Wells

Sarah Wells

Financial Times

Sarah Wells is the technical director for operations and reliability at the Financial Times. Her teams build operational and developer tooling and help engineering teams at the FT to support the systems they build, including coordination, communication and learning around major incidents. Previously, Sarah was a developer and tech lead for nearly 20 years. Building a new microservices-based system about five years ago led her to develop a deep interest in operability, observability, and DevOps—and learn a lot about containerization, Kubernetes, and Go in the process.