How to Stay Up When Everything Fails. Leveraging the Power of Erlang and Elixir

6:30 pm – Arrival of participants, networking & finger food
7:00 pm – Peter Hizalev – How to Stay Up When Everything Fails
8:30 pm – Networking & beer

Speaker: Peter Hizalev
Peter Hizalev is Director of Engineering for Team Collaboration at 8x8. Prior to this, he was co-founder & CTO at Sameroom.

Abstract:
We tend to build networked systems by following the easy-to-understand RPC (remote procedure call) communication model. It's just like invoking functions inside a program! Turns out, it's not that simple.

In our talk, we'll take a look at how system overload and failures cause the RPC approach to break down. We will explore an alternative model that uses asynchronous messaging and end-to-end backpressure by employing a simple acknowledgement protocol coupled with exponential backoff.

Finally, we'll see how the 8x8 team puts this theory to work by leveraging the Elixir programming language and the Erlang Virtual Machine.

Presentation Format: Presentation and Q&A session