Today we depend upon service providers (for storage, compute, network, DNS, CDN, and much more) to build and deliver our applications. Even when the most sophisticated service providers on the internet failand they doits still possible to build resilient applications. Kristopher Beevers explores how ops teams and developers are thinking about resiliency in a service provider world.

Pete Cheslock shares the operational and security practices that helped Threat Stack scale while staying stable and secure, covering technology and tools and the various scale points that forced hard decisions.

Adam Shepard peels back the covers on a user delivery networka worldwide distributed data store powering over 80 billion transactions a day at millisecond speed. Join in to learn about eventually consistent data architectures, tiered and hybrid storage layers, and what it takes to manage that much data at scale.

Even though HBase is considered a highly scalable distributed solution, there are cases where the schema design of HBase tables or the way a client uses an HBase cluster may impact the scalability factor of HBase. Ranjeeth Karthik Selvan Kathiresan and Gurpreet Multani outline the most important things to consider when scaling your HBase cluster to accommodate high-volume and high-velocity data.

Kubernetes has emerged as one of the leading container orchestrators. Sebastien Goasguen explores its architecture and compares it with other orchestration/scheduling systems, outlining the similarities and explaining why Kubernetes API primitives make all the difference.

Orchestration systems all have different design trade-offs. Despite best efforts, these choices are not always clear to developers using these systems. Dharmesh Kakadia describes the fundamentals of scheduling and explores the scheduling algorithms implemented by various orchestration systems, highlighting similarities, differences, and the consequences of the design choices for the users.

Conway's law tells us that "organizations which design systems. . .are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." What if we turn Conway's law around? Timothy Gross explores how to make technology choices that improve the culture of your organization.

Once reserved for companies large enough to write a load balancer from scratch, load balancer middleware can be a powerful tool for scaling applications. Emil Stolarsky and Justin Li explain how Shopify uses scriptable load balancers to solve difficult infrastructure problems, such as sharding across data centers, handling flash sales, and responding quickly to DDoS attacks.

Juan Pablo Buritic explains how to use technical RFCs as a decision-making tool in your engineering organization to increase effectiveness. When implemented properly, technical RFCs can encourage trust and delegation, respectful discussions, knowledge sharing, and accountability and support good software design.

Most tools designed to help you manage your systems fall into two categories: finders, such as monitoring services and log file analyzers, or fixers, such as cloud infrastructure providers or container orchestration. It's up to you to translate information from your finders into actions for your fixers. Cliff Crocker explains how to use intelligent analytics to connect data to actions.

Preaggregated metrics and time series form the backbone of many monitoring setups. They have many redeeming qualities but simply aren't sufficient for capturing or responding to the many ways things can go wrong in modern or complex systems. Christine Yen outlines the problems inherent in the use and implementation of preaggregated metrics.

There is compelling evidence that technical workers want leaders who are strong technologists, leaders they believe they can learn from. What does this mean for those who wish to become engineering managers and technical leaders? How can you be an effective noncoding technical leader? Camille Fournier explores this conundrum and shares strategies to overcome it.

DFINITY, a new kind of open cloud computing resource, takes the form of a decentralized network that conjures a performant "blockchain computer" with unbounded capacity that will act much like a gigantic shared mainframe for the world. Dominic Williams introduces the project and explores the foundational decentralized computing techniques it makes use of.

Dinesh Dutt explores network troubleshooting and explains how to avoid common network problems ranging from misconfigured cabling to misbehaving protocols, how a modern networking tool chest can help simplify network configurations, and how automation is improving troubleshooting turnaround times to minimize downtime.

Martin Woodward tells the story of how Microsofts internal engineering systems are being transformed from a collection of disparate in-house tools built up over decades to One Engineering System with a globally distributed 24x7x365 service on the public cloud, utilizing modern techniques and industry-recognized open source technologies.