IN PERSON: Debugging distributed systems, Event API's and Supersonic world!

This is the in-person event with LIMITED SEATS. Register here for the online version: https://www.meetup.com/Amsterdam-Java-User-Group/events/280691343/

Agenda

• 17:30 Doors open and food arrives
• 18:00 Welcome by Ramon Wieleman, Eltjona Qato (Digital at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)) and Fabio Fonseca (Digital at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group))
• 18:10 Talk 1 starts: "Debugging distributed systems" - Bert Jan Schrijver
• 19:00 Talk 2 starts: "Event APIs - Design to Distribute, at Scale @IKEA" - Debadri Gupta
• 19:25 Talk 3 starts: "Developer joy in the supersonic world at subatomic level" - Ivan Ivanov

Talk 1: Debugging distributed systems
Speaker: Bert Jan Schrijver (CTO at OpenValue)

Nowadays, most software projects are distributed systems: components are located on different networked computers which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages.
Debugging distributed systems is not easy. When two components don’t play nice together, the cause could be virtually anything: software, DNS, routing, firewalls, proxies, load balancers, TLS.. and more!

In this talk, I’ll share my experience with debugging distributed systems. We’ll look at typical issues and I’ll introduce a structured ways to debug those issues and find their root causes. We’ll dive into networking, infrastructure, logging/tracing/metrics, testing, remote debugging and more. I’ll share lots of examples and war stories along the way. After this talk, you’ll have practical knowledge on how and where to get started with debugging distributed systems yourself!

Talk 2: Event APIs - Design to Distribute, at Scale @IKEA
Speaker: Debadri Gupta (Engineering manager in Digital at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group))

IKEA’s home furnishing business and technology business share the same basic architectural design shift – from complete solutions to composable components. Also true is that, when you strive for excellence in omnichannel customer experience and business operations is often a matter of timing, and proactive timing is a matter for “Events”! Events (and the architecture around it) is key to building resilient applications as well, but in today’s world applications are mostly distributed – in IKEA’s case across 4 public Cloud providers, own Data Centers and the 378 odd stores globally. How do you unify design of the “composable components” (Events) and be able to distribute them across the complex multi-hybrid Cloud landscape, at enterprise scale? How do you ensure engineering teams have choice and autonomy, still surface data in an omni-present runtime - abstracting away connectivity, needs for firewall opening and reduce the cognitive load over all?

In this talk, I share IKEA’s experience in trying to solve some of the problems above. Look at how to think Events as first-class citizens, standardize design of Event APIs and distribute them globally!

Talk 3: Developer joy in the supersonic world at subatomic level
Speaker Ivan Ivanov: Software Engineer in Digital at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) & Java Champion

Multiple web and enterprise platforms and tools have already busted the myth that Java is slow and takes huge amount of memory. Free and open source frameworks like Micronaut, Quarkus and Helidon are already common among many teams and organizations, and all provide very quick startup time, extremely low memory footprint, cloud "nativeness" by design and what is most important: generating native images from your microservices. Thus Java is now everywhere: on the server side for long running application leveraging the power of the JIT compiler as well as in the serverless world helped by Graal VM and its AOT compiler.

After we put the troubles with resource consumption out of the way it's time to win developer's hearts. Especially those that come from Node.js world, where every change is available in less than a second after the browser refresh. And waiting for half a minute for the server restart to validate a small change in the code is a big no-no.