The Evolving Cloud

Everything is moving to the Cloud - but what does that actually mean? And how do companies deal with all the issues that come along with moving essential infrastructure out of the company or even the country? In this track we'll look at experiences with using IaaS/PaaS, the tools for virtualization (packaging, managing, deploying), security, the economics of modern cloud solutions and much more.

Day of week:

Thursday

Location:

Legends Ballroom Robinson / Whitman

Host:

Chris Swan

Presentations

Building an Enterprise PaaS

10:40am - 11:30am

By: Dave McCrory
CTO at Basho

In this session, Dave McCrory, SVP of Engineering for Warner Music Group, will talk about what it takes to build an Enterprise Platform as a Service. Covering data services, core application capabilities and design principals, CI, monitoring, coding standards, dependencies, security, and deployment.

The Business Value of IT in Today's Digital World

1:45pm - 2:35pm

By: Joe Weinman
Former SVP Cloud Services at Telx. Author of Cloudonomics

QCon is a developer conference, but what is the impact of all that development? Joe Weinman, the author of Cloudonomics, argues that IT is the weapon of choice in today's global marketplace and increasingly digital world.

Sure, IT can be used for mundane applications such as conference room reservations and expense reporting, but it can also be a source of competitive differentiation and advantage.

Putting your hard work as a developer into applications that can be the seed of a new business or transform an existing one will help ensure that you get the recognition that you deserve.

Computational Patterns of the Cloud

4:15pm - 5:05pm

By: Ines Sombra
Lead Data Engineer at Engine Yard

The Cloud has undoubtedly changed the way we think about computing, IT operations, innovation, and entrepreneurship. But what are the computational patterns that have emerged from the pervasiveness of public clouds? What can we leverage to improve our organizations? And what are the challenges that we face going forward?

In this talk, I will introduce you to cloud computing’s paradigms and discuss their applications with practical examples from Engine Yard’s customers, peers, and partners. We will also cover antipatterns and myths. If you are curious about Cloud computing or want to improve your cloud strategy this talk is for you.

Presentations

The Evolving Cloud Open Space

11:55am - 12:45pm

Enterprise IT: What's Beyond Virtualization

3:00pm - 3:50pm

By: Derek Collison
Founder of Apcera, building the next generation of PaaS

If your IT strategy is to drive virtualization from X% to Y%, your doing wrong.

What does the future look like for Enterprise IT, and how do we start the journey to a secure, trusted hybrid platform that truly delivers the business value and velocity we all want? In the era of software-defined everything, one goal is to reach a fluid infrastructure that has the level of plasticity needed to self heal itself and provide higher level SLAs for applications and services. Adding value to existing applications and services in a transparent fashion requires a rethinking of core technologies in the platform space.

In this talk we will take a look at some low level technologies and approaches to achieving this goal. Topics will range from Intelligent layer 7 SDN with semantic awareness, distributed scheduling algorithms, policy distribution and invalidation, health monitoring and management, self healing techniques, and the role of unsupervised deep machine learning and anomaly detection.

Canary Analyze All The Things: How we learned to Keep Calm and Release Often

5:30pm - 6:20pm

By: Roy Rapoport
Manager, Insight Engineering at Netflix

The process of releasing to production can be nerve wracking for any conscientious developer, especially when the product you're releasing is responsible for entertaining 48 million customers. Practically everyone who pushes to production spends some time after that push monitoring production, sometimes with a certain degree of trepidation.

In the last year or so, we've taken our most critical application, the system responsible for the Netflix API, and increased deployment cadence from semi-monthly deployments to daily deployments, all while lowering the effort on the part of developers, increasing availability for our customers, and building up our trust that when we deploy into production, that deployment is safe, predictable, and good for our customers -- and that when it is not, we'll know it isn't, we'll know it quickly, and we'll automatically revert changes. We've done this by investing in our real-time analytics capabilities and building an automated canary analysis system.

In this talk, we'll discuss canary analysis deployment and observability patterns we believe are generally useful, and talk about the difference between manual and automated canary analysis. Partially aspirational, partially utiliarian, our goal is to provide a useful way to think about canary analysis that will be applicable in most cloud-based engineering environments. We'll also discuss cloud-specific considerations (and opportunities) for canary analysis, as well as the next steps for Netflix's canary analysis system.