Build Systems that Drive Business
Sep 30–Oct 1, 2018: Training
Oct 1–3, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
New York, NY

Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Build and implement large-scale systems

As you adopt new architectures, DevOps principles, and cloud technologies like serverless, how does this change your systems infrastructure? We'll examine serverless concepts, storage systems, and how your applications deal with state management. We'll also explore scaling resources to meet demand, and how network, traffic management, and edge computing and management are key to application performance and latency.

We'll help you solve your toughest challenges with real-world advice from leaders in the field who have grappled with the same problems you're facing today. Like how to:

  • Implement a migration strategy at a massive scale
  • Architect a system to automatically identify and anticipate resource utilization bottlenecks using live traffic
  • Manage secrets on real hardware
  • Improve cache locality and optimize delivery
  • Handle scalability challenges for large distributed systems
9:00am–12:30pm Monday, October 1, 2018
Kubernetes 101
Location: Beekman/Sutton North Level: Beginner
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Bridget Kromhout (Microsoft)
Average rating: ****.
(4.78, 9 ratings)
Bridget Kromhout walks you through launching clusters and details all the moving parts you need to know about to use Kubernetes in production. Read more.
1:30pm–5:00pm Monday, October 1, 2018
Smart networking with service meshes
Location: Murray Hill East (B) Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Anubhav Mishra (HashiCorp)
Average rating: ***..
(3.00, 2 ratings)
Over the past year, service meshes have gained significant interest. Most service meshes have two components: a control plane and a data plane. Anubhav Mishra explains what it takes to build a scalable control and data plane. Anubhav also discusses how HashiCorp Consul provides many features like a distributed key-value store and service discovery that make it ideal for a control plane. Read more.
1:30pm–5:00pm Monday, October 1, 2018
Serverless APIs with AWS Lambda and API Gateway
Location: Beekman/Sutton North Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Bill Boulden (ClearView Social)
Average rating: ***..
(3.00, 1 rating)
Serverless architectures remove load from web servers and scale flawlessly to handle any volume while keeping you from paying for an instant of wasted idle time. Bill Boulden walks you through creating a functioning serverless API that coexists alongside conventionally served web pages using AWS Lambda and API Gateway. Read more.
11:35am–12:15pm Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Frankenstein's microservices: How to avoid the monster
Location: Sutton South/Regent Parlor Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Michael Hamrah (Namely)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 3 ratings)
Many companies adopt microservices to break down monoliths, but they soon uncover a hidden cost: How do you manage all these new interconnected things popping up? Michael Hamrah explains how to avoid creating Frankenstein's monster by understanding elements of a microservice platform. . .so you can sleep at night. Read more.
1:30pm–2:10pm Tuesday, October 2, 2018
How NTSB air disaster analysis can help you in an emergency
Location: Murray Hill Level: Beginner
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Matt Rogish (ReactiveOps)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)
Matt Rogish explains how NTSB investigations of air disasters have dramatically improved flight safety and applies lessons learned in disaster recovery and analysis, teamwork, task saturation, and systems design to modern software application and infrastructure architecture at scale to achieve higher availability, reduced errors, and more scalable systems. Read more.
1:30pm–2:10pm Tuesday, October 2, 2018
"Not invented here" syndrome and dark debt: The PagerDuty story
Location: Gramercy Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Aish Raj Dahal (PagerDuty)
Average rating: ***..
(3.25, 4 ratings)
Finding the right balance between writing custom in-house software and using an off-the-shelf solution is difficult. Aish Raj Dahal sheds light on the age old build versus buy problem and "not invented here syndrome" by explaining how PagerDuty built a distributed task scheduler and later moved off it to use an off-the-shelf open source solution. Read more.
1:30pm–2:10pm Tuesday, October 2, 2018
The container operator's manual
Location: Sutton South/Regent Parlor Level: Beginner
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Alice Goldfuss (GitHub)
Average rating: ****.
(4.75, 8 ratings)
Containers can be a great infrastructure solution, but no one should drive them without a manual. Alice Goldfuss discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of running containers in production at scale. Read more.
2:25pm–3:05pm Tuesday, October 2, 2018
60,000 tests in six minutes: Create a reliable pipeline, eliminate flaky tests, and deploy safely but quickly
Location: Gramercy Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Sam Guckenheimer (Microsoft)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 2 ratings)
Good test coverage is essential for catching issues before a pull request has been merged, but they have to be the right kind of tests and must be reliable. Drawing on his experience at Microsoft, Sam Guckenheimer details what type of tests to do in your DevOps pipeline, when you should do them, and why. Read more.
3:50pm–4:30pm Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Bulk image processing using Kubernetes
Location: Gramercy Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Mike Newswanger (Elastic)
Mike Newswanger explains how he used Kubernetes and Google Cloud to burst and extend the capacity of a physical infrastructure for optimizing almost 10 million images in less than two weeks. Read more.
4:45pm–5:25pm Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Archaic to orchestrated: Ticketmaster's hybrid DevOps transformation
Location: Gramercy Level: Non-technical
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Heather Osborn (Ticketmaster)
Heather Osborn explains how Ticketmaster moved from a siloed on-premises environment to a DevOps hybrid cloud. If a company whose technology and human infrastructure have grown up organically around a custom-written VAX operating system can make the move to public cloud-native applications and begin a rapid march to a hybrid cloud solution, so can you. Read more.
11:35am–12:15pm Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Availability, latency, and cost: Withstanding regional outages
Location: Murray Hill Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Aaron Blohowiak (Netflix)
Average rating: ***..
(3.00, 1 rating)
Multiregion deployments can improve availability and latency and can cost way less than you think. Aaron Blohowiak dives into his experience operating in multiple regions at scale at Netflix and shares the algebraic models, code, and incident management playbooks the company has developed to tame, refine, and leverage its approach. Read more.
1:30pm–2:10pm Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Migrating a recommendations platform from bare metal to the cloud
Location: Nassau Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Leemay Nassery (Comcast)
Average rating: **...
(2.00, 1 rating)
Leemay Nassery discusses the importance of data collection pipelines and explains how to efficiently store datasets with the intention of making them easily accessible by a downstream machine learning platform. Read more.
1:30pm–2:10pm Wednesday, October 3, 2018
How to get away with refactoring
Location: Murray Hill Level: Beginner
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Maude Lemaire (Slack Technologies, Inc.)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 6 ratings)
How do you refactor major, core functionality in a million-line codebase without disrupting the entire system? Maude Lemaire explains how Slack overhauled channels and shares the many obstacles the company overcame to boost both application performance and company-wide developer productivity (with only a few hiccups). Read more.
3:50pm–4:30pm Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Consuming cloud services with the Kubernetes Service Catalog
Location: Beekman/Sutton North Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Neil Peterson (Microsoft)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 1 rating)
Neil Peterson leads a technical deep dive into using the Kubernetes Service Catalog to dynamically provision and consume managed cloud services. Read more.
3:50pm–4:30pm Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Rebuilding the airplane in flight. . .safely
Location: Murray Hill Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Shannon Weyrick (NS1), James Royalty (NS1)
Average rating: ***..
(3.50, 2 ratings)
Rewriting the key software component of your platform from scratch is always intimidating. Shannon Weyrick and James Royalty discuss NS1's recent DNS server rewrite and outline the steps the company took to roll it out across its globally distributed network with no downtime. Read more.
4:45pm–5:25pm Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Switching horses midstream: The challenges of migrating 150+ microservices to Kubernetes
Location: Beekman/Sutton North Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Sarah Wells (Financial Times)
The Financial Times recently migrated its content platform to Kubernetes. Join Sarah Wells to find out what it takes to migrate 150+ microservices from one container stack to another without affecting the existing production users and while the rest of your teams are working on delivering new functionality. Read more.