DevOps Exchange January 2017

Happy New Year!

It's the first week of January, it's cold and dark outside with nothing to look forward to after 2 weeks out of the office.. Thankfully, The DevOps Exchange is back in January, being hosted again by our long term hosts Sainsbury's and with a special line up for our first event of the year.

We have an interesting theme this month with 3 Talks from leading London based Fintech organisations, and their DevOps experiences.

We have Oliver Beattie from Monzo talking us through their network architecture, how they have secured it, and the lessons they've learnt along the way. Chris Sinjakli from GoCardless will be discussing how reliability became so important to them, and diving into a recent feature for zero-downtime patch upgrades.

Last but not least, we have Ed Hargin and Kyrylo Novotarskyi from TransferWise, who will be talking about their move from a monolithic codebase and shared infrastructure towards independent infrastructure management that is focused on helping solve customer problems.

Agenda:

6.30pm - 7pm: Arrive and drinks

7pm - 8pm: 3 x 20 minute talks

8pm: Further discussion / pizza / drinks

7.00pm: Chris Sinjakli - SRE @ GoCardless

On the surface, the tech behind a payments API may look like any other startup. You'll probably find some Rails apps, a database, and a bunch of stuff off to the sides to glue it together. At GoCardless, we've found it's mostly not the tech that differs, but the approach.

Using our high-availability Postgres cluster as a running example, we'll explore how reliability became so important to us, and dive into the most recent feature we built into the cluster: zero-downtime patch upgrades.

7.20pm: Oliver Beattie - Head of Engineering @ Monzo

In one hand, Monzo’s backend is composed of hundreds of micro services running in Kubernetes. On the other, banks need to interconnect to hordes of legacy systems, often involving physical kit and leased lines. This presents an interesting networking challenge. Oliver goes into detail about how Monzo has designed its network architecture, how they secure it, and lots of lessons learned along the way.

7.40pm: Ed Hargin - Lead of DevOps & Kyrylo Novotarskyi - Software Engineer for Currencies and Banking @ TransferWise

Service discovery and configuration management at TransferWise.

One of the things standing in the way of effective and scalable engineering is shared infrastructure. Ed and Kyrylo will focus on the journey TransferWise took from shared to independent infrastructure management, including moving from legacy manual towards automatic instance provisioning, the evolution of service registration and discovery adoption, and the introduction of centralised distributed configuration storage, including secret management techniques, testing, troubleshooting and disaster recovery scenarios.

This is a talk about how 2 teams, inherently connected, work towards independence, boring routines and less communication.

As always, we have quite a tight capacity, so please register as soon as you can to avoid disappointment. We have been at capacity at the venue for the last 3 events, so please do make sure to RSVP.

Look forward to seeing you there,

All the best,

Tony, Luke, David, and the rest of the DOXLON team

@linuxrecruit (https://twitter.com/linuxrecruit?lang=en-gb) @dataloopio (https://twitter.com/DataLoopIO?lang=en-gb) @doxlon (https://twitter.com/doxlon?lang=en-gb)

Sponsors

LinuxRecruit (http://linuxrecruit.co.uk/jobs)

LinuxRecruit are a specialist consultancy within the Open Source industry and have been introducing great Engineers to great organisations across the UK since 2011. LinuxRecruit have managed to build relationships with many of the country’s leading Open Source adopters, have carved out a significant niche within the DevOps community and are continuing to cement their reputation as an honest, reliable and thought-leading consultancy in this industry.

Dataloop.IO (https://www.dataloop.io/)

Dataloop.IO's mission is to make monitoring for online services effortless. As quick and easy to install as New Relic, but with the flexibility of Nagios, Graphite & StatsD, you can monitor all your servers and custom metrics at scale, creating beautiful dashboards of your key business and operational metrics that can be presented across your organisation, and alert of any metric using our unique and powerful If This Then That alerting engine. If you're a Operations/DevOps team struggling with monitoring your online service, particularly if you're using Micro-Services, get in touch with us to see how we can help!