Case studies from the most relevant names in software
Track: Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Location: Broadway Ballroom North, 6th fl.
Day of week:
Track Host: Jean Barmash
VP Engineering @KomodoHealth
Jean Barmash is VP of Engineering at Komodo Health, where he is working to reduce the global burden of disease using Big Data and Machine Learning technologies. Prior to that, he was Director of Engineering at Compass, and VP of Engineering, Apps Platform & Marketplaces at Tradeshift. Jean has over 19 years of experience in software industry, and has been part of 6 startups, three as CTO / VPE and one of which he co-founded. Prior to his entrepreneurial adventures, Jean held a number of progressively senior roles in product development, integration consulting, and team leadership, working with Fortune 100 companies like Ford, Microsoft, BofA, Citi, IHG, and Adobe.
Jean is passionate about raising the level of technical leadership in the industry, and for the last six years has been organizing CTO School New York meetup, an organization he co-founded and grew to over 2,500 members. Jean lives in NY with his awesome and supportive wife and two hilariously-funny kids.
Trackhost Interview
- QCon: What’s the motivation for your track?
Jean: Architectures You've Always Wondered About is about finding stories of interesting architectures operating at scale. We look for things that are still on the newer side and thus pushes the state of the art. For example, several talks this year are about bringing multiple disciplines together - machine learning, search, IOT, devops through newer deployment tools. As a result, this track is a bit less about in-depth coverage of a specific topic, but about taking stock of where we are as an industry.
- QCon: What’s the level & core persona?
Jean: The core persona is senior developers and architects, although realistically, this is the track that all attendees should find something interesting. Anybody who wonders about architectures ;-).
- QCon: What 3 actionable things do you want persona to walk away with?
Jean: Because the talks are so diverse, this is a difficult question to answer. I think seeing some of these architectures being used by mature companies for challenging problems will help attendees take another look at them and consider incorporating them into their work, even if they have been hesitant to do so in the past.
- QCon: What was surprising about this year's track?
Jean: I hosted this track two years ago. What struck me this year is how much the industry embraced machine learning in a very short amount of time - it is becoming a key part of many systems. Also, as I said above, today's architectures are very much about taking advantage of different components - cloud frameworks, data analysis techniques, different API-based providers and open source components, infrastructure innovations and IOT devices. The world is also becoming increasingly integrated, with more ways to reach your customers (such as chatbots), and that of course is reflected in the architectures. Truly exciting time to be a leader in the industry, which I know QCon attendees are.
Scaling Event Sourcing for Netflix Downloads
In November of 2016 Netflix successfully launched its new Download feature, allowing users to download and play content offline on their mobile devices. This feature required us to change our previously stateless distributed licensing service to be real time and stateful. In a matter of months we needed to create a brand new stateful service that could evolve with rapid feature requirement iterations, while also being able to scale to millions of members using the feature across the globe.
This talk describes how we achieved these goals with the use of a Cassandra-backed event sourcing architecture. We describe our event store implementation, including the use of data versioning and snapshotting to provide flexibility and scale. We will cover what we learned along the way, and what we could have done better. Finally, we will review some improvements and extensions that we are planning to address going forward. Attendees will take home some compelling reasons to consider event sourcing for their architectures: it’s flexibility to adapt to changing business requirements, the relevance to distributed and scalable microservice architecture, and the means to replay a timeline of events and determine current or potential state.
Unifying Banks & Blockchains @Coinbase
With over 6 million users across 33 countries, Coinbase is an industry leader building the bridge between traditional finance and the blockchain space. Our goal at Coinbase is to provide simple and secure exchange services to users worldwide for blockchain-based digital assets. The networks that power these digital currencies are complex and significantly different from traditional banking integrations. In this presentation, I provide an overview of blockchain protocols and discuss how our unified architecture for payment services abstracts away integration-specific logic from core transaction processing. We will dive into the details of Coinbase’s Bitcoin, Ethereum, and US banking integrations and compare how they implement the generalized service interface.
Jim Posen, Tech Lead @Coinbase
IOT and Edge Compute at Chick-fil-A
Internet of Things (IoT) is radically changing the way Chick-fil-A does business. At Chick-fil-A, we see IoT as a strategic capability to enable in-restaurant interactions, from the front-of-house customer experience to back-of-house kitchen automation. IoT discussions often stop at data collection, but the real value comes when IoT can enable new interactions and drive automation.
In this session, you will learn how Chick-fil-A architected our IoT platform and created a digital ecosystem that enables our business to deploy IoT solutions to restaurants. We will talk about our approach to secure device onboarding, how we’ve applied Identity Management to IoT, how we govern interactions between different “things". There are unique security challenges related to IOT.
We also have interesting requirements around resiliency - with 2000 restaurants, it’s quite likely that some of them will be unable to connect to cloud services. I will talk about how we provide a Docker-based edge compute infrastructure by installing some servers in each restaurant that can support business-critical processes even when “offline”. . We will also touch on how we collect and forward data from “things” to the cloud to apply machine learning and AI to make better business decisions.
Brian Chambers, Enterprise Architect @ChickfilA
Architecture & Algorithms Powering Search @ZocDoc
Most physician search systems require patients to know exactly what they’re looking for, either in terms of the appropriate specialty for a given condition or the medical terminology to describe the condition. At Zocdoc, we have built a patient friendly search system to power our core doctor discovery and booking platform using various products from the AWS stack and custom Machine Learning pipelines. This talk will focus on the anatomy of our Patient Powered Search and will cover both the architecture and algorithms that enable us to go from “ear ache” to “otolaryngologist.”
Scalable Chatbot Architecture with eBay ShopBot
ebay ShopBot is a personal shopping assistant available as a Facebook Messenger bot. It surfaces the best shopping options with the least effort in a conversational style. ShopBot leverages an array of AI components and the richness of ebay user data. In this session you will learn of the internals of the ebay ShopBot and how the processing of text, image and speech flows through the purpose-built system leveraging the product knowledge graph, commerce-aware input recognizers and the Dialog Manager.
Robert Enyedi, MTS Software Engineer @eBay
Architectures AMA Panel
Karen Siers, Agile Coach at Kapture Technologies