Track: Immutable Infrastructures: Orchestration, Serverless, and More

Location: Broadway Ballroom South, 6th fl.

Day of week:

Immutable infrastructures represent one of the more elegant ways to deploy scalable, resilient, and service oriented architectures. Isolating compute functions from persistence and treating functionality as the unit of deployment liberates architectures from designing for the availability of a single piece of hardware. Serverless infrastructure takes this concept to the micro-scale; removing the platform from the equation and focusing on the exact code and function needed to fulfill a request.

In this track, we will examine the current and future state of immutable and serverless infrastructures. Experts will share tools, practical strategies, and epic tales of success and defeat in designing immutable and serverless systems that are resilient, scalable, and secure.

Track Host: Ben Hagen

VP Cloud Architect @Salesforce & ’12 Obama Re-Election Campaign Tech Program Security

Ben Hagen is likely the only security professional in the world who has won both a presidential election and an Emmy. He loves security and both building and breaking things. Ben is currently a Vice President/Principle Infrastructure Security Architect at Salesforce and previously lead the Cloud Security Tools and Operations team at Netflix. During the 2012 US Presidential Election he was in charge of security for the Obama re-election campaign’s technology program. Prior to this role, he was a Security Consultant with Neohapsis, and Motorola where he had to break into, and then help fix, the computer networks of lots of organizations. He has built lots of fun tools and systems, has held many impressive sounding certifications, and enjoys pizza and cats.

Trackhost Interview

QCon: What’s the motivation for your track?
Ben: Technology professionals have done a great job of inventing new ways to do the same thing. There is always a "newer and better" ... in my years working at Netflix I became a convert to the "tao of immutable servers" and orchestration is a key capability needed to solve any sufficiently complex service architecture at scale. Serverless architectures have been a more recent passion; the ability to develop, deploy, and scale a 50 line script with a few simple commands is incredible. All of these areas are important concepts for the modern developer and deployer to understand. More fundamentally, the ability to deploy a datacenter's worth of systems and functionality via code is magical and exciting.
QCon: What’s the level & core persona?
Ben: We are aiming at the intermediate to expert implementor in this track ... those who know enough to be dangerous, but might need some more guidance before learning to rule the world. Talks on orchestration will be mostly applicable to the deployers out there, whereas serverless and immutable talks are probably applicable to both developers and deployers. Attendees working with cloud-first architectures have the most to gain, but the techniques and concepts should be applicable across a variety of deployment methods.
QCon: What 3 actionable things do you want persona to walk away with?
Ben: Hopefully more than three, but here goes:
- Learn how to consider security and other fundamental concepts with serverless architectures
- Learn how to think creatively and include serverless-like-bits into complex deployments to save time and money
- Learn how to do large workloads with smart orchestration
QCon: There are a lot of parts to this track (Immutable Infrastructures, Orchestration, Serverless), what is going on?
Ben: All of these areas help solve a fundamental problem ... removing the complication of system level configurations from your deployment mechanism and focusing on the application and service being delivered. I'll be satisfied if this track inspires people to try something new with these exciting new technologies and techniques.

A Series of Unfortunate Container Events @Netflix

Project Titus is Netflix's container runtime on top of Amazon EC2. Titus powers algorithm research through massively parallel model training, media encoding, data research notebooks, ad hoc reporting, NodeJS UI services, stream processing and general micro-services. As an update from last year's talk, we will focus on the lessons learned operating one of the largest container runtimes on a public cloud. We'll cover the migration we've seen of applications and frameworks from VM's to containers. We will cover the operational issues with containers that only showed after we reached the large scale (1000's of container hosts, 100's of thousands of containers launched weekly) we are currently supporting. We'll touch base on the unique features we have added to help both batch and microservices run across a variety of runtimes (Java, R, NodeJS, Python, etc) and how higher level frameworks have taken avantage of Titus's scheduling capabilities.

Andrew Spyker, Manager, Netflix Container Cloud @Netflix
Amit Joshi, Senior Software Engineer @Netflix

Presidential Campaigns & Immutable Infrastructure

Hillary for America was arguably one of 2016’s largest startups. It was in the news every day, raised billions of dollars, and grew at an incredibly fast rate. There was even a very splashy exit. But what isn’t often talked about is the technical infrastructure behind it. Over the course of 18 months, HFA tech’s SRE team built and ran an immutable infrastructure, supporting a tech org that started with one developer and grew to 80, letting people deploy hundreds of times a day, with little to no downtime. In this talk Michael will explore how the campaign systematically approached every design decision to stay true to immutable principles, leveraging AWS infrastructure along with open source technology like Packer, Ansible, Consul, and a healthy dose of Varnish.

Michael Fisher, Site Reliability Engineering Manager @HFA

Serverless Sec & Things That Go Bump in the Night

Serverless architectures created using Functions as a Service solutions like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions or Azure Functions unlock new design patterns at extremely low cost, but with the servers having gone into hiding under the bed, have all our security problems also left our bedroom for good? This lighthearted talk will first cover just what is this new Serverless beast, how best to understand it and what sorts of things are possible. With that understanding we will then explore what nightmares might come true if we forget to check under the bed, close the closet door or accidentally leave the bedroom window open at night.

Key Takeaways

Discuss how to think about Serverless computing
Analyze what it means for the future of cloud applications
Learn how existing security challenges change and new ones emerge

Erik Peterson, CEO & Co-Founder @CloudZeroInc

Serverless Platform: Scientific Computation @Scale

Data Intensive applications are everywhere, and they present a very unique set of challenges that traditional OLTP services present. Over the last decades we have re-invented how data intensive applications work by deploying Map-Reduce at scale with Hadoop, and recently by Spark and Samza which enables stream processing thereby reducing latency for various use cases. With recent advents in Virtual Reality, Edge Computing and Deep Learning for image recognition, we are collecting more data than ever which makes it harder for existing data processing infrastructure to operate at scale when it becomes impractical to move data to compute services because of economics and limitations in resources. Further, as infrastructure is more complex, the programming model is also becoming harder and therefore makes it challenging for end users to be efficient who are doing research on new algorithmic models.

At NASA Ames Research Lab we are developing a platform for running computations as functions which would make it easier for researchers, application developers to program their applications and algorithms without any boilerplate details about the underlying infrastructure such as servers, storage shards, network, etc. This talk is going to go into the problems we are trying to solve and provide a high level overview of the platform

Diptanu Choudhury, Cloud Infrastructure Engineer @Facebook

Managing Millions of Data Services @Heroku

Over the years, Heroku Data's offerings continue to grow and reach new higher demands with Postgres, Kafka and Redis. Performing repairs, maintainenances, applying patches and auditing a fleet of millions creates some serious time constraints. We'll walk through the evolution of fleet orchestration, immutable infrastructure, security auditing and more to see how managing the data services for many Salesforce customers, start-ups and hobby developers alike is done with as little human interaction as possible.

Gabriel Enslein, Senior Infrastructure Engineer @Heroku

Tracks

2019 Schedule

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