O'Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream Series

EVENT 4: MICROSERVICES - NOVEMBER 18, 9:00AM–1:00PM PT | 12:00PM–4:00PM ET | 5:00PM–9:00PM UTC/GMT

Sam Newman: Introduction (5 minutes) - 9:00am PT | 12:00pm ET | 5:00pm UTC/GMT

• Sam Newman welcomes you to the Infrastructure & Ops Superstream Series.

Sarah Wells: From the Trenches (50 minutes) - 9:05am PT | 12:05pm ET | 5:05pm UTC/GMT

• The Financial Times’ Sarah Wells recounts some of the challenges she’s faced during her career and sheds light on the things that worked well (and those that didn’t).
• Sarah Wells is the technical director responsible for operations and reliability at the Financial Times. She’s been a developer for 15 years, leading delivery teams across consultancy, financial services, and media. Over the last few years, she’s developed a deep interest in operability, observability, and DevOps.
• Break (10 minutes)

Joy Ebertz: How to Split a Monolith—Service Architecture and Domain-Driven Design (50 minutes) - 10:05am PT | 1:05pm ET | 6:05pm UTC/GMT

• Box, like many other companies, is working to split its monolith into microservices. But the company wanted to make sure it didn't want to end up with a distributed monolith (i.e., lots of services that still had a very high level of interdependency) or several "minimonoliths." Joy Ebertz explains how Box approached this problem, applying strategies including domain-driven design (DDD) and platform service architecture to determine how and where to divide its services. Join in to dive deep into these two approaches and find out how Box applied each to its problem space.
• Joy Ebertz is a senior staff software engineer at Split.io, focusing primarily on backend. Previously, she worked at Box, where her projects included leading the effort to transition Box's monolith to microservices and revamping the company’s authorization framework. She also worked at a tiny startup and at Microsoft. In addition to designing software and writing a lot of code, she shares her insights on her blog. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, reading, and running ridiculously long distances (mostly on trails).
• Break (5 minutes)

Alexandra Noonan: To Microservices and Back Again (50 minutes) - 11:00am PT | 2:00pm ET | 7:00pm UTC/GMT

• Microservices have many benefits, but when implemented incorrectly, these benefits can quickly become burdens. Customer data platform Segment embraced a microservices architecture in its control plane and data plane from the start. But after years of continuing to add to its microservices architecture, the company found that its developer velocity was quickly declining and teams were constantly tripping over the complexity of its microservice architecture. Drawing on this experience, Alexandra Noonan shares the microservices anti-patterns to avoid, the trade-offs between a monolith and microservices, how to identify when it's time to take a step back and make a big change—and how moving to a monolith was the solution that worked for Segment.
• Alexandra Noonan is a backend engineer who spends most of her time building reliable, scalable systems. She's been working at Segment for the past four years, building focused distributed systems and scaling the company’s core data pipeline.
• Break (10 minutes)

Chris Evans: Microservices in the Wild (50 minutes) - 12:00pm PT | 3:00pm ET | 8:00pm UTC/GMT

• Monzo has built a bank serving over 4 million customers with a platform comprised of over 1,500 microservices. When the company was formed in 2015, the decision to use microservices was an obvious one, driven by a desire to move fast and in control—and it’s allowed the company to do just that. Despite the success of the approach, the decision to split business logic into discrete, network accessible services rather than functions or classes within a more monolithic deployment is still hotly debated externally. Do the benefits of microservices really outweigh the costs of operating over unreliable networks? Chris Evans offers a behind-the-scenes look at how Monzo operates its business and discusses some of the tools, systems, and processes that allow it to build, deploy, and manage microservices at scale.
• Chris Evans is the technical director of platform and reliability at Monzo, a bank that’s changing the way people interact with money. His teams are responsible for building and operating the Monzo platform, covering everything from its physical data centers to its Kubernetes-based microservice platform in AWS. Since he joined in March 2018, Monzo has grown by more than four million customers and its engineering team has added over 1,000 new microservices to production.

Sam Newman: Closing Remarks (10 minutes) - 12:50pm PT | 3:50pm ET | 8:50pm UTC/GMT