O'Reilly Velocity Conference

The Misinformation Age

February 9, 2020

Data scientist Jane Adams examines the ways in which these strategies actually fail to achieve the intended result, and more importantly how they perpetuate discriminatory hiring practices.

Understanding gossip protocols

February 9, 2020

Flix Lpez Luis offers an introduction to gossip protocols, using a simulator to demonstrate how they behave when there are challenges like network partitions and faulty nodes.

What changes when we go offline first?

February 9, 2020

We all know how to build web apps around a central server. Increasingly, we want to develop apps in which the user can still get work done while offline and that sync their data the next time an internet connection is available. Martin Kleppmann shares recent computer science research that is helping develop the abstractions and APIs for the next generation of applications.

Writing a Kubernetes operator to deploy a complex system

February 9, 2020

The Kubernetes API is extensible, allowing you to create your own resources that behave like native ones. Philippe Martin explores the tools, concepts, and a real example of a custom resource that simplifies the deployment of a complete content delivery network (CDN).

"Not invented here" syndrome and dark debt: The PagerDuty story

February 2, 2020

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.

60,000 tests in six minutes: Create a reliable pipeline, eliminate flaky tests, and deploy safely but quickly

February 2, 2020

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.

A programmer's guide to secure connections

February 2, 2020

Beyond looking out for a little green padlock in the browser bar, what do you need to know about secure connections as a programmer? What do people mean by terms like authentication, verifying a certificate, or signing a message? Join Liz Rice as she demystifies HTTPS, TLS, X.509, and more.

Ansible for SRE teams

February 1, 2020

Ansible is a "batteries included" automation, configuration management, and orchestration tool that's fast to learn and flexible enough for any architecture. Join James Meickle to get started with Ansible, with an eye toward sustainable development in cloud environments.

Attack trees: Security modeling for Agile teams

February 1, 2020

Traditional security approaches to threat and risk management are highly optimized to work within a traditional software development lifecycle. Michael Brunton-Spall shares a new approach to reviewing systems along with real-life examples to help you prioritize where to focus security efforts and what sorts of security threats you should worry about.

Availability, latency, and cost: Withstanding regional outages

February 1, 2020

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.

Beyond accidental architecture

February 1, 2020

Accidental architecture is a product of circumstances rather than deliberate development toward a goal. James Thompson explains why it's best addressed by equipping teams to make more deliberate and informed technical decisions.

Building successful site reliability engineering in large enterprises

February 1, 2020

Implementing site reliability (SRE) engineering doesn't have to be intimidating, and it isn't only for cloud-native organizations. Liz Fong-Jones and Dave Rensin share eight key lessons Google's customer reliability engineering team learned helping large enterprises adopt SRE as an operations engineering model.

Bulk image processing using Kubernetes

February 1, 2020

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.

Communicating and managing change

February 1, 2020

Evolving teams and evolving companies are a constant in the career of a leader; helping your team navigate through that change becomes critical to your success as a manager and for the organization. Rocio Delgado shares dos and don'ts for managing and communicating change in your team or organization, which may highlight where your own skills need to evolve.

Consuming cloud services with the Kubernetes Service Catalog

February 1, 2020

Neil Peterson leads a technical deep dive into using the Kubernetes Service Catalog to dynamically provision and consume managed cloud services.

Continuous Disintegration

January 31, 2020

As our industry faces its biggest reckoning ever with the social, ethical and cultural impacts of technology, what can we learn if we reflect on the assumptions we build into our systems? How could our processes and tools be designed to undo the biggest bugs and biases of todays tech?

Creating an Effective Developer Experience on Kubernetes

January 31, 2020

Join this talk to learn about how to curate your perfect developer experience using Kubernetes.

Disaster resilience the Waffle House way, from flattops to feature flags and more

January 31, 2020

Waffle House's hurricane disaster plan has everything you could want from an IT disaster plan, including contact trees, failover states, and runbooks on partial operation. Heidi Waterhouse shares lessons about state drawn from the world outside computers and explains how to quantify them using a finite state machine and implement them automatically while you are in a less-than-perfect condition.

Faster is safer: Security in the enterprise

January 31, 2020

Molly Crowther demonstrates how the enterprise can use cloud platforms to make security move at the pace of businessnot the other way around.

Frankenstein's microservices: How to avoid the monster

January 31, 2020

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.

From silos to a single pane of glass at USA TODAY NETWORK

January 31, 2020

Three years ago, technical teams at USA TODAY NETWORK were completely siloed, making improvements and troubleshooting difficult and often blind to the rest of the technical organization. Bridget Lane and Kris Vincent explain how drastically the teams' tool belts, thought processes, and goals have changed as the company moved from silos to a single pane of glass.

How do we solve the world's spreadsheet problem?

January 31, 2020

In the past five years, Alexander Rasmussen has spent a lot of time trying to get high-integrity data out of spreadsheets and into databases. Alexander explores common data integrity problems when dealing with spreadsheet data, investigates whether those integrity problems are inescapable, and shares ongoing work to mitigate them.

How NTSB air disaster analysis can help you in an emergency

January 31, 2020

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.

How to break up with your vendor

January 31, 2020

You're unsatisfied with one of your monitoring providers. You've considered finding a new solution, but the thought of migrating your data off their platform sounds extremely painful. Amy Nguyen and Cory Watson explain how to make a deadline for an infrastructure-critical software migration while ensuring that everyone's requirements are met and no data has been lost.

How to get away with refactoring

January 30, 2020

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).

Integrating developer and operator experience in Kubernetes

January 30, 2020

Developer and operator personas are often viewed as separate, but the truth on the ground is actually far more mixed. Developers often operate their own software, and operators often explore software to find and fix bugs. Brendan Burns covers this overlap, explaining how to build tooling and approaches that enable developers and operators to quickly switch or blend between the personas.

Knative: Kubernetes, serverless, and you

January 30, 2020

It's a Kubernetes world. Join Ryan Gregg to learn about Knative, an open source collaboration between Google and other industry leaders to define the future of serverless on Kubernetes. Knative solves the difficult but boring aspects of running modern cloud applications on Kubernetes.

Kubernetes bootcamp: Deploying and scaling microservices

January 30, 2020

Kubernetes has a reputation for being complex to set up and operate, but that doesn't have to be the case. Join Jrme Petazzoni to explore Kubernetes concepts and architecture and learn how to use it to deploy and scale your applications. The content is suitable to all kinds of deployment models, from the cloud (AKS, EKS, GKE, kops, etc.) to on-premises.