Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Distributed Computing
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Scaling a distributed system naturally involves adding multiple independently moving parts. We run our software components on multiple machines and our databases across multiple storage nodes, all in the quest to add more processing capacity—meaning solutions are distributed across multiple machines in multiple locations, with each machine processing events concurrently and exchanging messages over a network. This fundamental nature of distributed systems has some profound implications for the way we design, build, and operate our solutions. If you need to manage the complexity that comes with distributed systems, these sessions will help you tackle some of the unique challenges of production with multiple moving parts.
About the Infrastructure & Ops Superstream Series: This four-part Superstream series guides you through what you need to know about modernizing your organization’s infrastructure and operations, with each event day covering different topics and lasting no more than four hours. They’re packed with the expert insights, skills, and tools that will help you effectively manage existing legacy systems while migrating to modern, scalable, cost-effective infrastructures—with no interruption to your business.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- See how distributed systems can deliver more value if they operate correctly
- Explore best practices for communication between distributed systems
- Understand what distributed systems mean for your company’s data
- Learn how to secure distributed systems
This live event is for you because...
- You’re an engineer who wants to learn more about the challenges of working with distributed systems and find out how to address them.
- You want to learn how to secure distributed systems.
- You want to know what the future holds for distributed systems and infrastructure and operations.
Prerequisites
- Come with your questions
- Have a pen and paper handy to capture notes, insights, and inspiration
Recommended follow-up:
- Read Designing Distributed Systems (book)
- Read Distributed Systems Observability (report)
- Watch Distributed Systems in One Lesson (video)
- Read Distributed Tracing in Practice (book)
- Take Design Patterns for Distributed Systems (live online training course with Priyank Gupta)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Sam Newman: Introduction (5 minutes) - 8:00am PT | 11:00am ET | 3:00pm UTC/GMT
- Sam Newman welcomes you to the Infrastructure & Ops Superstream.
Martin Kleppmann: Meet the Expert (50 minutes) - 8:05am PT | 11:05am ET | 3:05pm UTC/GMT
- Join us for a special conversation with author, entrepreneur, and researcher Martin Kleppmann. Martin will discuss how to understand complex systems and their trade-offs, solve hard technical problems, improve the practice of software development by developing the underlying theory, and design and develop usable and beautiful user interfaces. Along the way, he’ll recount some of the challenges he’s faced during his career, shedding light on the things that worked well (and those that didn’t).
- Martin Kleppmann is a researcher in distributed systems and security at the University of Cambridge and the author of the best-selling book Designing Data-Intensive Applications (O'Reilly). Previously, he was a software engineer and entrepreneur, cofounding and selling two startups and working on large-scale data infrastructure at LinkedIn.
- Break (10 minutes)
Melinda Lu: Events First—Distributed Computing Beyond Request/Response (50 minutes) - 9:05am PT | 12:05pm ET | 4:05pm UTC/GMT
- Distributed computing is about how we design our applications, not just how we deploy them. And one key choice in distributed systems design is how our applications interact with each other. Request/response protocols are ubiquitous in software today, but event-driven approaches offer compelling advantages for highly distributed systems. Melinda Lu shares lessons learned from using event-driven patterns to scale real-world systems and offers practical advice on how to use these patterns to make your applications more adaptable, reliable, and scalable.
- Melinda Lu is a cofounder and engineer at eggy and Collective Carbon, where she's working on applying distributed computing to climate chemistry. Previously, she worked on internet-scale distributed systems at VSCO and built engineering teams and technology in synthetic biology, civil infrastructure, and aerospace. She dislikes systems of human suffering and likes books.
- Break (10 minutes)
Hanna Prinz: Service Meshes—Istio, Linkerd. . .or No Mesh at All? (50 minutes) - 10:05am PT | 1:05pm ET | 5:05pm UTC/GMT
- Service meshes like Istio and Linkerd 2 solve many of the problems of current microservice applications. They add observability, routing, resilience, and security features as a dedicated infrastructure layer. And communication between applications can be monitored, configured, and secured without adding or changing application code. Sounds too good to be true? Indeed, a service mesh comes with a price: mental complexity, increased resource consumption, and latency being the main challenges. Hanna Prinz discusses meaningful use cases for service meshes, taking you through their drawbacks and the differences between various implementations.
- Hanna Prinz is a senior consultant at INNOQ, focusing on service meshes and infrastructure. Previously, she was a backend, web, and app developer and a lecturer on programming. Ever since she experienced the challenges of ops, she’s been most interested in the field of automation and DevOps, including Kubernetes, CI/CD, and service meshes.
- Break (10 minutes)
Bilgin Ibryam: The Evolution of Distributed Systems on Kubernetes (50 minutes) - 11:05am PT | 2:05pm ET | 6:05pm UTC/GMT
- Join Bilgin Ibryam on a journey exploring Kubernetes primitives, design patterns, new workload types, and more.
- Bilgin Ibryam is a product manager and an ex-principal architect at Red Hat as well as a committer and member of the Apache Software Foundation. He’s a lifelong open source evangelist, prolific blogger, speaker, and the author of Kubernetes Patterns and Camel Design Patterns.
Sam Newman: Closing Remarks (5 minutes) - 11:55am PT | 2:55pm ET | 6:55pm UTC/GMT
- Sam Newman closes out today’s event.
Upcoming Infrastructure & Ops Superstream events:
- Linux Fundamentals - September 14, 2022
- Operationalizing Kubernetes - November 9, 2022
Your Host
Sam Newman
Sam Newman is a technologist focusing on the areas of cloud, microservices, and continuous delivery—three topics which seem to overlap frequently. He provides consulting, training, and advisory services to startups and large multinational enterprises alike, drawing on his more than 20 years in IT as a developer, sysadmin, and architect. Sam is the author of the best-selling Building Microservices and Monolith to Microservices, both from O’Reilly, and is also an experienced conference speaker.