Presentation: Panel: The Promises and Perils of Eschewing Distributed Coordination

Cindy Sridharan is a distributed systems engineer. She's the author of a book on Distributed Systems Observability with O'Reilly and the co-author of an upcoming book on distributed systems engineering in the cloud. She runs the Prometheus user group in San Francisco, has been a reviewer of several technical books and on the program committee of leading industry conferences on systems engineering. She lives in San Francisco and in her spare time enjoys hiking the gorgeous outdoors of the Bay Area, reading way too many papers and occasionally blogging about building resilient and maintainable systems.

Colm is an engineer at Amazon Web Services. For just over ten years Colm has been building some of the largest services at AWS, including Amazon EC2, S3, ELB, CloudFront, and Route53.  Colm is also an active Open Source contributor and is the main author of Amazon s2n, AWS's Open Source implementation of TLS/SSL, as well as a member of the Apache Software Foundation and a core contributor to Apache httpd and apr. In evenings and weekends, Colm is an Irish folk musician and singer and regular tours, produces and records albums, and enjoys teaching workshops. 

Chenggang Wu is a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley working with Professor Joseph M. Hellerstein. His research interest lies in distributed systems, specifically coordination-free architectures, distributed consistency models, and serverless infrastructure. Prior to joining Berkeley, he obtained his B.S. degree in computer science from Brown University in 2015.

Armon has a passion for distributed systems and their application to real world problems. He is currently the CTO of HashiCorp, where he brings distributed systems into the world of DevOps tooling. He has worked on Terraform, Consul, and Serf at HashiCorp, and maintains the Statsite and Bloomd OSS projects as well.

Peter is the co-founder of Cockroach Labs where he works on a bit of everything, from low level optimization of code to refining the overall design. He has worked on distributed systems for most of his career, designing and implementing the original Gmail backend search and storage system at Google and designing and implementing Colossus, the successor to Google's original distributed file system. In his university days he was one of the original authors of the GIMP and is still amazed when people tell him they use it frequently.

Sean T. Allen is vice president of engineering at Wallaroo Labs and a member of the Pony core team. His turn-ons include programming languages, distributed computing, Hiwatt amplifiers, and Fender Telecasters. His turn-offs include mayonnaise, stirring yogurt, and sloppy code. He’s one of the authors of Storm Applied.