Track: Sponsored Solutions Track I

10:35am - 11:25am

Software Updates in an Orchestrated World

Scaling software teams is hard. The explosion of new tools, packaging, and orchestration approaches has only added to the challenge. In this talk I'll illustrate, through examples and demos, a systematic way of managing package repositories and metadata for all types, from operating system packages to Kubernetes and serverless. Knowing what is being built and deployed enables teams to trust the process so they can release fast.

11:50am - 12:40pm

WebAssembly 101

If you’re curious about WebAssembly and what it means for the future of web development, this session is for you. In this session I will provide an introduction to, and overview of WebAssembly. I’ll cover what it is, what it isn’t, and the various ways it can interoperate with JavaScript in the browser and other host environments. I’ll cover limitations, use cases, and show sample code in raw WebAssembly as well as illustrate how to use powerful languages like Rust to generate extremely fast, safe WebAssembly modules.

1:40pm - 2:30pm

Understanding Code Performance in Production

What's going on in production?! Are you tired of asking this question or just curious at how others are solving this issue with application monitoring? Come and hear about why it's vital to have real-time feedback on the performance of your code in production, how you can use this data to improve your applications, and how AppDynamics helped customers achieve these goals.

2:55pm - 3:45pm

Autonomous Microservices

Everybody loves microservices, but it's difficult to do it right. Distributed systems are much more complex to develop and maintain. Over time, you may even miss the simplicity of old monoliths. In this session, I propose a combination of infrastructure, architecture, and design principles to bulletproof your microservices and make them easy to maintain with a combination of high scalability, elasticity, fault tolerance, and resilience.

This session will include a discussion of microservices blueprints like: asynchronous communications, avoiding cascading failures in synchronous calls, and how distributed NoSQL databases become valuable in terms of scalability and performance when combined with your microservices in a Kubernetes deployment.

4:10pm - 5:00pm

3 Common Pitfalls in Microservice Integration

Integrating microservices and taming distributed systems is hard. In this talk I will present three challenges we observed in real-life projects and discuss how to avoid them.

1. Communication is complex. With everything being distributed failures are normal so you need sophisticated failure handling strategies (e.g. stateful retry).

2. Asynchronicity requires you to handle timeouts. This is not only about milliseconds, systems get much more resilient when you can wait for minutes, hours or even longer.

3. Distributed transactions cannot simply be delegated to protocols like XA. So you need to solve the requirement to retain consistency in case of failures.

I will not only use slides but demonstrate concrete source code examples available on GitHub.

5:25pm - 6:15pm

Explaining Artificial Intelligence to Schoolchildren

In this talk, Dale will give an industry perspective on why introducing machine learning to kids is so essential, and share some of IBM’s experiences for how it can be done effectively - with some of the projects that school kids have created, and the lessons learned from these efforts.