Presentation: Dynamically Re-Configurable Event-Driven Systems

Track: Innovations in Fintech

Location: Broadway Ballroom South, 6th fl.

Day of week:

Slides: Download Slides

Level: Intermediate

Persona: Architect, Developer

What You’ll Learn

  • Learn about the potential impact of using event-driven with stateful applications.
  • Discover how to build systems that scale to cope with load peaks.
  • Analyze and discuss challenges with scalability in the FinTech space.

Abstract

To take on new competitors and grab the attention of new generations of clients, traditional financial institutions are faced with the challenge of reinventing their service offering for a digital economy. Our new services must combine modern data types with legacy data, with interaction throughput's an order of magnitude higher. And when existing back-end systems are not architecturally or technologically geared up for these challenges, a new solution approach is needed. In this talk, we cover a modern business agile approach that combines * Event driven business modeling and * Affinity collocation of data and processing to enable financial institutions to design, develop, test, deploy and change services fast in a controlled and non intrusive way.

Question: 

QCon: What's the focus of your work today?

Answer: 

Danny: I'm CTO of The Glue, so I'm heading up our architecture, design, and engineering teams. We're building a next generation engagement platform for banks. My main focus is to make sure that it has all the functionality and features the banks are expecting. As part of it, there are some complex issues—that I will present in my talk—that need to be solved. I also focus on facilitating people to come up with pragmatic solutions for the problems we face using a variety of new technologies.

Question: 

QCon: What are some of the unique challenges of building an event-driven system that targets the FinTech domain?

Answer: 

Danny: The biggest challenge is guaranteeing exactly once processing of the events. This is extremely, extremely important in the financial world—once you have acknowledged an event, we take on the responsibility to make sure that whatever the action is linked with, it will be executed. No matter what happens, we must assure that it gets executed. So it’s absolutely the biggest challenge in this type of system. Another challenge is scalability to cope with load peaks, you cannot just move the data around, or you can move it around it has a cost, so it's this balancing of scalability for processing versus having heavy data—which is heavy to replicate, is also an issue for which a solution will be found. And that's exactly what we've tried to solve in our system.

Question: 

QCon: What can attendees expect from your talk?

Answer: 

Danny: I'm going to pose challenges to the audience and try to give a small example for scalability. Typically, in a financial application, you know quite well how the load will evolve, with the exception of the things happening in the stock market. If it's about payments for instance you know that on the first day of the sales or on the weekend before Christmas there will be a high increase in electronic payments. So you can plan your scalability in advance, but you still must be able to do this scaling. So I'll be introducing a problem, with some small example and then say how we in our system we solve that.

Question: 

QCon: Who is your target audience?

Answer: 

Danny: I think solution architects will get a lot from this talk, as well as CTO’s who are interesting in learning about the challenges we faced, and overcome.

Question: 

QCon: What will someone walk away from your talk with?

Answer: 

Danny: The two messages I think they should take away with it is, firstly, if you have an application that must be stateful—especially with shared state—if you want use an event-driven way, there's quite some impact. The second thing is how to build a system such that people who are not developer rockstar's can still use it successfully.

Question: 

QCon: What technology, practice, tool what would you recommend we be looking into right now?

Answer: 

Danny: If it's about efficient development it's definitely investing in a fully automated DevOps chain, continuous integration. This is not new, but absolutely necessary. And the second thing is, I would absolutely look at everything that has to do with being able to have your systems deployed on a cloud-based system, anything which requires dedicated hardware or which can only run on a local systems is doomed.

Speaker: Danny Goovaerts

CTO at THE GLUE SOLUTIONS

Danny Goovaerts is CTO of The Glue which builds a contemporary, new software platform which enables financial institutions to quickly develop innovative financial services for today’s consumers. Danny has more than 20 years of experience in analysis, design and delivery of advanced software solutions, mainly in the financial services industry (clearing and settlement, retail banking, asset management, SWIFT connectivity,...). He was the head of the architecture and development teams for several software products for data access, messaging and connectivity (DataDirect, Capco, Swift) He strongly advocates that non-functional requirements have to be handled as first-class citizens. One of his guiding principles is : "Find a solution for your problem, not vice versa". Danny holds a ph.d. in Computer sciences of the KU Leuven.

Find Danny Goovaerts at

Similar Talks

Java Futures, 2019 Edition

Qcon

Java Language Architect @Oracle

Brian Goetz

Are We Really Cloud-Native?

Qcon

Director of Technology @Luminis_eu

Bert Ertman

The Trouble With Learning in Complex Systems

Qcon

Senior Cloud Advocate @Microsoft

Jason Hand

What Breaks Our Systems: A Taxonomy of Black Swans

Qcon

Site Reliability Engineer @Slack, Contributor to Seeking SRE, & SRECon Steering Committee

Laura Nolan