Application health checking and probing have existed since the dawn of computer science. Usually seen as a trivial task, health checking becomes more involved when applied to distributed cloud-native apps. Alexander Rukletsov discusses the challenges and perils of modern health checking and shares lessons learned during the revamp of the Apache Mesos health checks subsystem.

In a containerized deployment, how do you safely pass secrets like passwords and certificates between containers without compromising their safety? If orchestration means a container can run on any machine in the cluster, how do you minimize who knows your secrets? Liz Rice explores the risks and shares best practices for keeping your secrets safe.

Container orchestration platform Kubernetes has seen unprecedented traction and adoption in the last few years. However, it can be difficult to figure out how to actually deploy your applications on Kubernetes if you're new to the space. Michelle Noorali walks you through configuring, deploying, and managing applications on Kubernetes using an open source tool called Helm.

Drawing on real-world metrics data from thousands of organizations, Ilan Rabinovitch shares the latest trends in container adoption and use, explores the types of applications organizations are running in containers, and explains how to best monitor these containerized applications.

Kelly Looney shares an incremental approach to introducing containers into complex, distributed applications—resulting in modernization with less risk and more reward. You’ll learn how to evaluate which components of your applications are best suited for containers, how to experiment safely and get fast feedback, and how to increase and scale your container adoption.

The Netflix download feature allows users to download content for offline playback. Implementing this feature required a new persistence architecture to maintain the state of user devices and content licenses. Joseph Breuer and Robert Reta explore the technical decisions behind the choice of a Cassandra event sourcing data store.

Machine learning is as accessible as it has ever been, but it’s not always obvious how to go from a cool paper to serving production traffic. Ben Linsay helps you get started putting your paper into production, sharing lessons learned solving real problems with machine learning at Kickstarter.

Leif Walsh offers an overview of Flint, Two Sigma's open source time series extension to Spark, explains how it fits in with the Spark programming model, and lays out the roadmap for the future of pandas, PySpark, and Flint.

On the surface, adapting software to use persistent memory seems obvious. After all, persistent memory is simply fast memory that maintains state when the power goes out, like an SSD. But unlike SSDs, persistent memory challenges long-held ideas and conventions about how software works. Rob Dickinson outlines four key ideas that will help focus your persistent memory strategy.

The cost of coordinating access to information in a distributed system increases as the system scales up. Andrew Turley offers an overview of the entity-based approach to addressing this issue and explains how it has influenced the design of Wallaroo, a platform for building high-performance, event-driven systems.

Our industry is continuing to mature, and there is a path for you. Bryan Liles explores paths for starting a career in systems engineering, ideas on where we could go in the future, and how words, technology, and empathy impact the people and projects we interact with every day.

Serverless means handing off server management to the cloud platforms—along with their security risks. With the “pros” ensuring our servers are patched, what’s left for application owners to protect? As it turns out, quite a lot. Guy Podjarny explores the aspects of security serverless doesn’t solve, the problems it could make worse, and the tools and practices you can use to keep yourself safe.

How does a large 50-year-old company go from purchasing much of its technology and working with yearlong release cycles to building multiple products in-house and releasing daily? Jon Moore traces the changing set of tools, techniques, and attitudes that have powered (and still power) this transformation at Comcast over the last decade, mapping out a path you can follow in your own company.

Most people think about microservices as a solution for scale. That may be the case, but operating them is definitely a scale challenge. Sarah Wells explains why, when you have 100+ services, everything needs to be automated, or else you'll spend two days updating Jenkins build pipelines or be woken up every night by false alarms caused by network blips.

People aren't just wrong on the internet. Sometimes they bring it back to the office. Blake Bisset and Jonah Horowitz share stories about anti-patterns in monitoring, incident response, configuration management, and more and explain how Google and Netflix view the role of the SRE (and how it differs from the traditional system administrator role).

Most people working with CDN caches know about the Vary header, but few properly understand what it really does. With the advent of the Key header, new patterns for varying cache content will soon emerge. Andrew Betts shares common and advanced use cases for Vary, such as language, A/B testing, compression, and service worker support, and outlines potential changes to consider when Key arrives.

Serving a billion requests per day with a dynamic video packager makes unique demands on a load balancer. Andrew Rodland shares a new consistent hashing algorithm developed by Google researchers that helped improve cache locality and optimize delivery—and made a contribution to open source software in the process.

During flash sales, when milliseconds matter, bots buy faster than humans. These bots created a constant load on Shopify’s infrastructure and SREs—until the company decided to create an automated system to detect and block nearly all bot traffic on its load balancers. Felix Glaser offers an overview of this system and shares the challenges Shopify faced differentiating between bots and humans.

Kristopher Beevers discusses the evolution of the edge delivery architecture of major DNS service provider NS1, from its earliest prototypes to the large, heavily automated global network it operates today, and the many operational lessons learned along the way.

Susie Xia and Anant Rao explain how LinkedIn leverages live production traffic to determine service and resource bottlenecks at scale with a tool called Redliner and how you can use your current architecture to do the same.

Mary Treseler, James Turnbull, and Ines Sombra welcome you to the first day of keynotes.

As technology advances, our systems are growing more and more complex, reaching the threshold of what we can handle and even comprehend. We need more than tools to keep it under control. We need new ways of thinking. Carin Meier explores new ways to approach systems and tame complexity for the rapidly changing future.

During active operational incidents, we experience very human reactions that get in the way of resolution. Approaches like Incident Command provide solid foundations for incident response. Kristopher Beevers explains how to augment Incident Command with simple tools and processes that help your team focus, communicate effectively, and respond calmly and precisely during mission-critical events.

We like to think that technology can make the world a better place, but we (conveniently) forget how it can make it worse. Primum non nocere (first do no harm) is the first concept taught in medical school, serving as a reminder of the possible harm that any intervention might do. Cynthia Savard Saucier challenges the tech industry to come up with its own fundamental principle.

Business transformation has led us to adopt new technologies and process and cultural changes. How batch application automation is built, tested, and run must evolve to keep pace. Joe Goldberg explores jobs as code, which looks at batch application automation from an SDLC perspective—an approach that embeds expectations within a modern automation platform.

Claire Le Goues shares recent advances in academic software engineering and programming languages research that aims to bring that dream to reality, using everything from metaheuristic search to program synthesis to machine learning and search over big databases of existing code to make it happen.

In government, you can still find out-of-date tech practices like writing requirements for years or launching systems without monitoring. The government wants more effective technology. Meanwhile, everyone else wants a more effective government. Matt Cutts discusses how better technology can improve not just software systems but also trust in government itself.

Bitcoin showed us a new way of moving value around the internet without intermediaries. Neha Narula explains how this paradigm might apply to our traditional ways of thinking about databases that cross organizational boundaries. As data on the web becomes consolidated around a few key players, the blockchain might help users gain more control.

Keynotes

Are you managing distributed teams with very different stakeholders—perhaps even a mix of hobbyists and paid staff? It probably seemed easy at first, but the further you travel, the more unfamiliar the terrain appears. Luckily, this is not new ground. Many have gotten lost here before and found their way out again. VM Brasseur and Deb Nicholson share a map to productive, happy teams.

In 2005, a World of Warcraft bug helped epidemiological research in unexpected ways. Margaret Gourlay draws on this research to share insight into what works and what doesn’t for functional teams and explains how using these ideas has helped VictorOps strategically grow its engineering team in unexpected ways.

Lisa Phillips shares strategies for overcoming individual and organizational management challenges in a globally diverse environment and explores people management challenges and methods to work with the grumpiest admin.

John Le Drew draws on the hours of interviews he conducted with some of the most respected people in the industry for the Agile Path podcast to explain what psychological safety is and why you should care about it, as he walks you through a series of highly interactive role-playing and improvisation exercises.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea explains how to lead technical decision making for high-performing teams.

CDN automation and pipeline integration can often be a daunting task. Too often these services are integrated late in the delivery process, traditionally in the QA or production deployment phases. Duncan McCallister and Akshay Ranganath share approaches that account for CDNs much earlier in the development lifecycle and highlight specific considerations around CI/CD pipeline integration.

Oded Keret shares HPE's performance testing experience, the challenges the company overcame, and the lessons learned along the way.

Microsoft has widely deployed field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for accelerating search, networking, and machine learning—with a little help from the company’s software expertise and its FPGA programmers. Mike Strickland explains how a single FPGA can deliver significant acceleration for multiple workloads.

Arshan Dabirsiaghi explains what Contrast Security learned from the Struts 2 exploit and details how to stop the next attack against your production apps.

When the Healthcare.gov website failed, it was a turning point and an opportunity. In the last few years, hundreds of engineers, designers, and product managers have signed up to do tours of service in government. Matt Cutts explores what happens when technology and government mix. A lot of interesting things, it turns out.

Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions provide face-to-face exposure to those interested in the same projects and concepts. BoFs can be organized for individual projects or broader topics (best practices, open data, standards, etc.). BoFs are entirely up to you. We post your topic and provide the space and time. You provide the engaging topic.

Meet us before the opening keynotes on Tuesday morning and get to know fellow attendees in quick, 60-second discussions.

Join us in the Sponsor Pavilion after the afternoon sessions on Tuesday, October 3, from 5:25pm to 7:00pm for the Velocity Sponsor Pavilion Reception. Visit the exhibitors, mingle with other attendees, and enjoy great refreshments and drinks.

Join us for the social highlight of Velocity New York at one of New York's finest rooftop lounges, the Attic, located at 251 West 48th Street at 8th Avenue. Enjoy great music, food, and cocktails while networking and making new connections.