O'Reilly Velocity Conference

And now for something Vary different

January 21, 2020

Most people working with CDN caches know about the Vary header, but few properly understand what it really does. And with the advent of the Key header, new patterns for varying cache content will 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.

Biological computation

January 21, 2020

Sara-Jane Dunn discusses an entirely different paradigm of computing: the information-processing carried out by cells. Focusing on examples from cutting-edge stem cell research, Sara shares formal techniques from computer science that allow us to peer into the inner workings of biology, make sense of the earliest stages of development, and even program cells for use in therapy.

Blockchain and the future of distributed computing

January 20, 2020

Although the blockchain is technically a distributed system, there has been a surprising lack interest from the distributed systems community. Catherine Mulligan explores the implications of the blockchain to distributed systems and explains what needs to be addressed in order to build and maintain them effectively.

Building next-gen edge architecture at Expedia

January 20, 2020

As Expedia refactors its backend services into a finer-grained microservice architecture, frontend applications have begun to be split into smaller applications serving a small number of pages or content on the website. Rick Fast details how Expedia is creating an extremely configurable, self-service edge architecture for routing between frontend applications and managing bot traffic.

Can we make developers care about operations?

January 20, 2020

Can we make developers care about operations? Jrgen Cito shares real-world experience of developers struggling with operations and details a journey to incorporate runtime performance aspects into the developer's daily workflow and reduce performance problems reaching production.

Changing Diversity Constructs, My Journey As A Women In DevOps

January 20, 2020

Soo shares her experiences as a woman in tech. Even though she worked for NASA and co-founded her own successful company, rampant sexism in IT and bad experiences speaking in public nearly destroyed her career. She will examine common constructs about diversity and propose ideas to bring productive change to continue to build upon the solid foundation of inclusion we have created.

Cloud native: Security threat or opportunity?

January 20, 2020

Your organization wants to go cloud native, but you don't want to hit the headlines as the victim of the latest hacking scandal. Liz Rice addresses the questions you need answers to: Will your deployments be less secure or more? How do DevOps processes like CI/CD and cluster orchestration affect your security profile? And what can we all do to minimize the risk of exploits?

Consul as a monitoring service

January 20, 2020

There are two sides to monitoring: exposing problems and taking action to resolve them. Most monitoring systems handle the first, but Consul handles both. Seth Vargo explains how Consul enables self-healing infrastructure. By coupling service discovery with monitoring, Consul is able to intelligently route traffic away from unhealthy hosts or fail over to geographically different data centers.

Consumer-driven contract testing with Pact and Docker

January 20, 2020

Harry Winser explains how to leverage consumer-driven contracts to achieve fully independent releases of microservices across teams and how to handle a service rollback while still serving over 47 million requests a day. Harry also demonstrates how to use the Pact framework to continuously deliver services that depend on one another and Docker to make developer testing easier.

Continuous performance engineering: Moving fast without breaking things

January 20, 2020

With ever-increasing demands for fast business change, how can we ensure our digital channels reflect the exacting standards of performance our customers (and business owners) expect? What does this look like in an age of DevOps and continuous delivery? Thomas Barns and John Pillar share a strategy for shifting left and automating performance analysis.

DDoS war games: Strengthen your team and systems by attacking them

January 20, 2020

DDoS mitigation is an ever-evolving art. Architectures change, attackers get more creative, and keeping your team and tools ahead of the curve is a constant battle. So why not make DDoS preparedness fun as well as practical? Shannon Weyrick explains why you should use DDoS war games to keep your teams skillset polished, their tools in top shape, and their spirits and confidence high.

Distributed systems: What can go wrong will go wrong

January 20, 2020

Forget Conway's law. In distributed systems, Murphys law rules: Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Anne Currie discusses common failure modes, how to approach diagnosing highly complex issues, and what we can learn from detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple.

Edge compute: The missing pieces

January 20, 2020

Edge computing is a hot topic, but despite all the hype, there are still some major hurdles to overcome before it reaches its full potential. Tyler McMullen outlines the technical and economic challenges and explains how we can get past them.

Emergent distributed architectures: Microservices and data pipelines

January 19, 2020

Peter Bourgon and Sean Braithwaite offer an overview of microservices and data pipelines, explaining how both systems reflect the organizations and people that build them (in adherence to Conways law) and can be well understood in terms of their relationship to change and time. You'll learn the virtues and vices of each architecture and get enough context to apply them coherently.

Failover early: When to failover at your CDN

January 19, 2020

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. Your risk mitigation strategy must layer the most cost-efficient strategies to effectively mitigate or reduce the adverse effects of failure. Manuel Alvarez explores using the CDN as a failover tool, reviewing use cases and demonstrating how to decide whether to use a CDN by evaluating costs, benefits, operations, and time to mitigate.

FPGA-accelerated data analytics (sponsored by Intel)

January 19, 2020

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

How secure are Docker containers?

January 19, 2020

Docker offers many advantages, simplifying both development and production environments. But there is still uncertainty around the security of containers. Ben Hall answers the question, How secure are Docker containers?, exploring Docker's security model, its limitations, and how to handle them.

How to make a lion bulletproof: Setting up site reliability engineering (SRE) in a global financial organization

January 19, 2020

Did you read the OReilly book about Google SREs but doubt that SRE will work for your more traditional or more regulated company? Janna Brummel and Robin van Zijll explain how they implemented SRE in a global financial organization, providing an overview of methods and technologies and sharing lessons learned from a year of doing SRE.

HTTP/2 development: A hands-on approach

January 18, 2020

HTTP/2 (or H2, as the cool kids call it) has been ratified for months, and browsers already support it. But do the exciting features that HTTP/2 offers meet expectations? Frederik Deweerdt explores how HTTP/2 fares in the real world, how browser behavior is changing to accommodate new server-side functionality, and how you can get the most of the new protocol everybodys talking about.

Humane teams at home and around the world

January 18, 2020

Software development is a social activity that favors direct human contact, yet 21st century life can often get in the way, forcing us to reconsider our communication patterns. Daniel Young and Emma Jane Hogbin Westby explore how to build and maintain happy productive teams, regardless of geography.

Increasing visibility of distributed systems in production

January 18, 2020

Understanding the state of a running application is the key to efficiently troubleshooting production issues and ultimately anticipating outages. Pierre Vincent demonstrates how to make monitoring an integral part of development, using health checks, metrics, tracing, and other patterns to get a clearer picture of applications in production.

Indispensable, disposable Jenkins

January 18, 2020

You rely on Jenkins to manage the full stack of your continuous delivery pipeline, but why shouldnt Jenkins itself be software defined, ephemeral, and available at the push of a button? Mandy Hubbard explains how Care.com uses a customized, script-based startup process and Joyents ContainerPilot with a just few edits to a Docker Compose _env file to launch Jenkins in a Docker container.

Informed intentions meet Tech for Good

January 18, 2020

What happens when Tech for Good and human-centered design actually support the needs of their end users? Laura Hackney explores the pitfalls and successes of the movement to bring social justice work into the technology landscape. Laura also shares insights from AnnieCannons, her nonprofit dedicated to transforming survivors of human trafficking into software professionals.

Lessons learned building serverless distributed systems

January 18, 2020

Episource just finished building a scalable, resilient serverless distributed data pipeline for coding medical charts using NLP, which scales seamlessly with the amount of data it takes in as input. Raj Rohit explores the system and the tools used to build it, such as Ansible, Lambda, and Terraform, and shares the pitfalls, failures, successes, and lessons learned along the way.

Make load balancing great again

January 18, 2020

Emile Vauge explains how to effectively manage inbound network traffic in your container-based infrastructure with Traefik, a modern reverse proxy and load balancer made to deploy microservices with ease.

Monitoring containers: Follow the data

January 18, 2020

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

Online performance analysis of distributed dataflow systems

January 17, 2020

Vasia Kalavri offers an overview of Strymon, a system for predictive data center analytics, and its online critical path analysis module. Strymon analyzes live traces from distributed dataflow systems like Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and TensorFlow to predict bottlenecks and provide insights on streaming application performance.

Overcoming traditional data analytics performance bottlenecks with inline acceleration (sponsored by Intel)

January 17, 2020

A new approach to data analytics acceleration is delivering benchmarked performance increases of 3X to 10X+ at the system level for traditional relational and NoSQL databases.