Schedule: Systems Engineering sessions

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

Terran Melconian explores an organized process for observing a misbehaving complex system, reasoning about possible causes, and isolating the fault. While it is not generally taught, all the successful senior engineers with operational experience Terran has talked to use a variant of this process. Read more.

Kate Deutscher explores common pitfalls to automating software delivery and explains how to find the processes in your delivery pipeline that can benefit the most from automation, focusing on three patterns commonly seen in automation tooling, backed by real-world case studies of when this pattern has worked well—and when it has ended in rampant failure. Read more.

Tanya Reilly explores the parts of disaster recovery you might be less prepared for, covering why the best laid fallback plans tend to go wrong and why you should start deliberately managing your dependencies long before you think you need to. Read more.

Voice UIs like Amazon's Alexa can make systems management simple, intuitive, and delightful. The virtual private assistant feel of a VUI, coupled with the abstraction that voice commands bring, break the tedium of management tasks. Karthik Kirupanithi demonstrates how to put together an Alexa skill that can perform tasks using the EC2 Systems Manager. Read more.

Millions of people visit Quora's home feed to find high-quality content personalized to their interests. It is powered by a highly performant distributed system running sophisticated ML algorithms. Nikhil Garg and Neeraj Agrawal describe the evolution of the home feed's architecture and share several lessons from building and scaling this system. Read more.