O'Reilly Velocity Conference

Performance beyond improv

February 26, 2020

In the world of software development or technology in general, performance often gets overlooked or is looked at late. Daniel Drozdzewski examines the philosophical aspects and benefits of keeping performance at the forefront of your mind.

PostgreSQL at low level: Stay curious

February 26, 2020

Dmitrii Dolgov takes a deep dive into how to troubleshoot intricate performance issues in PostgreSQL using such tools as strace, perf, extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF). And stay curious.

Prioritizing trust while creating applications

February 26, 2020

Time and money are generally the resources we focus on when building applications. Yet we cant buy trust; it builds slowly and can be broken quickly when we dont factor it in to our development process. Jennifer Davis examines how to leverage security practices to enable an all-team approach to security.

Revolutionizing a bank: Introducing service mesh and a secure container platform

February 26, 2020

For years, Janna Brummel and Robin van Zijll have been told no to any external hosting. They've always lost time by not being able to use open source and cloud native products without adjustments. All because they work for a bank. Things are changing now: Janna and Robin are proving it's possible to run APIs in a secure container platform in the public cloud.

Secure reliable systems

February 26, 2020

Ana Oprea examines SRE and security best practices for designing, operating, and scaling dependable infrastructure.

Test-driven development (TDD) for infrastructure

February 26, 2020

In software development, test-driven development (TDD) is the process of writing tests and then developing functionality to pass the tests. Rosemary Wang explores methods of adapting and applying TDD to configuring and deploying infrastructure as code.

The definitive guide to making software fail on ARM64

February 26, 2020

Even software, written in high-level cross-platform language with no assembly can fail multiple ways when ported to a different CPU architecture. Ignat Korchagin examines the issues Cloudflare encountered when porting its software stack to ARM64.

The deputy shot the sheriff: Privilege escalation in build pipelines

February 25, 2020

Build pipelines are commonly used in the industry to build and roll out changes to cloud accounts. Typically, wide permissions are granted to those systems, making them an interesting attack vector. Take a look with Andreas Sieferlinger at typical vulnerabilities and examine the case of the confused deputya trusted third-party partyand how these vulnerabilities can be mitigated in real-life.

The elephant in the Kubernetes room: Team interactions

February 25, 2020

Regardless of all the technical benefits that Kubernetes brings, team interactions are still key for successfully delivering and running services. Manuel Pais explores how team design affects the success of Kubernetes adoption.

The golden idol swap: Pragmatic database migration

February 25, 2020

Switching databases requires a lot of effort from engineering teams, and Christian Grabowski walks you through steps you can take to reduce the amount of work needed to achieve payoff. NS1 created an abstraction layer of wire protocols between old and new databases, which allowed it to develop advanced functionality in new services, while legacy services required minimal changes.

The path to build happiness

February 25, 2020

Jenn Strater walks you through the best practices she's learned since transitioning from a software engineer at various product companies to working for a company that focuses on build automation.

The power of good abstractions in systems design

February 25, 2020

This talk shows how good abstractions make it possible to identify and apply solutions to seemingly unrelated problems from different disciplines to build better systems with less effort.

The ultimate guide to complicated systems

February 25, 2020

Building and maintaining distributed systems is hard. Industry tools and recommended practices are evolving at an ever-increasing velocity. New platform choices reduce infrastructure management and add operational complexity obscuring the value of operation skills. Often, bureaucratic decisions drive practices and tool choices.

Understanding Kubernetes

February 25, 2020

Jonathan Johnson introduces you to Kubernetes for software engineers through concepts and a hands-on tutorials using KataCoda.com/javajon.

What remains of dashboards and metrics without the hype and anti-patterns

February 24, 2020

Open source tools for dashboarding and metrics have seen massive adoption in recent years. Riding the hype, the new, shiny tools are inevitably confronted with overblown expectations and problematic usage patterns, causing frustration and criticism. Bjrn Rabenstein outlines how to use dashboards and metrics effectively rather than condemning them altogether.

Base64 is not encryption: A better story for Kubernetes secrets

January 22, 2020

By default all Kubernetes secrets are base64 encoded and stored as plaintext in etcd. Seth Vargo shares techniques for securing Kubernetes secrets, including encryption, KMS plug-ins, and tools like HashiCorp Vault and the trade-offs of each approach to better secure their clusters.

Build a backend with TypeScript using Nest.js (sponsored by Square)

January 22, 2020

TypeScript is overtaking the JavaScript world. Nest.js is a progressive Node.js framework for building efficient, reliable, and scalable server-side applications using TypeScript. It's modular, testable, and very similar in structure to Angular but built for backends. Richard Moot covers how Nest.js makes things better when building a TypeScript app.

Building serverless solutions that are resilient, scalable, and cost effective

January 22, 2020

Ruth Yakubu explores end-to-end serverless scenarios on Microsoft Azure Functions, Azure Cosmos DB, and Event Grid.

Channel into the universe of eventually perfect distributed systems

January 22, 2020

Lena Hall takes you on an adventure into the multifaceted universe of ever-changing distributed systems.

Community projects inform enterprise products (sponsored by Microsoft Azure)

January 22, 2020

Lachlan Evenson and Bridget Kromhout discuss Microsoft's journey to build Kubernetes policy controller Gatekeeper in the open and explain how the tool helped inform how an enterprise offering on Azure. Join in for pragmatic tips on how to effectively contribute to and use open source tools.

Containers can actually improve your security story

January 21, 2020

Maya Kaczorowski explores how containers offer a fundamentally different, possibly better, security model than you're used to. They enable you to patch your environment more easily, identify when you're affected by a new vulnerability, and enforce governance for what is deployed in your environment.

Cultivating production excellence

January 21, 2020

Join Liz Fong-Jones to explore several practices core to production excellence: giving everyone a stake in production, collaborating to ensure observability, measuring with service level objectives, and prioritizing improvements using risk analysis.

Fixing the performance of your (probably broken) HTTP/2 deployment

January 21, 2020

Patrick Meenan lets you in on how HTTP/2 prioritization is effectively broken in most deployments and shows you how to detect, debug, and fix the issues.

From puzzles to products

January 21, 2020

Jess Kerr argues that most programming careers aren't about writing software; they're about changing it. With this distinction, she'll share some things about reuse, delivery, quality, and how to grow as a programmer.

How did things go right: Learning more from incidents

January 21, 2020

Join Ryan Kitchens for an introduction to Safety-II concepts that will help move the industry forward, increasing the opportunity for learning from success with some fundamental and practical ways that get us from "Why did things go wrong?" to "How did things go right?"

How do we heal?

January 21, 2020

We've been working to foster a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable tech industry for years, but we have yet to see meaningful and lasting change. Drawing inspiration from restorative justice practices and her own journey of healing, Alex Qin offers a hopeful vision for how we can come together and cocreate the world we yearn for.

How I failed to build a runbook automation system and what I learned

January 21, 2020

You're going to automate all the things, reduce toil, and make your systems smarter and recover automatically. . .except sometimes you're automating a house of cards built on the back of individual people and a well-meaning solution can fail to address the true problems in the system. Tim Bonci offers a postmortem of a solution that was designed to solve a common operational problem but failed.

Infrastructure first: Because solving complex problems needs more than technology

January 21, 2020

Drawing from work in technology, community development finance, social psychology, complexity theory, and championship sports, Everett Harper moves to the edge of these disciplines, centering on the key practices that are crucial for solving our most critical challenges.