Building resilient systems and fostering a culture of reliability

Building effective, reliable systems depends equally on the people and the technology.

In this session, we’ll be taking a look at the technologies and common patterns for building resilient applications and the importance of creating a culture of reliability through Objectives.

Reliability patterns for serverless applications

Serverless technologies offer a great foundation for building resilient applications that can withstand much turbulence in the production environment. For instance, AWS Lambda automatically deploys your code to three availability zones and replaces faulty virtual machines on the fly. Despite this, there are still many other types of failures that can still affect our application. Perhaps there is an outage with a third-party service we depend on, or maybe a sudden surge in throughput has pushed us over the throughput limit and caused some user requests to be throttled.

What can we do to minimize the impact of these failure modes on the user experience and prevent data loss?

In this talk, Yan will look at some common patterns (and trade-offs) for building resilient serverless applications.

Yan is an experienced engineer who has run production workload at scale in AWS since 2010. He has been an architect and principal engineer with a variety of industries ranging from banking, e-commerce, sports streaming to mobile gaming. Nowadays, he splits his time between advancing the state of serverless observability as a Developer Advocate at lumigo.io and helping companies around the world adopt serverless as an independent consultant. He keeps an active blog and hosts a serverless-focused podcast.

Building a culture of reliability: the power of objectives

Objectives are fantastic! They convey the desired end goal while allowing progress to be measured. During this lightning talk, we will discuss the way that objectives can be set, measured, reflected on, and refined, all to affect the development of a specific culture.

Mick is a lead software engineer at Reliably who believes that you can't build a reliable, effective system without bringing people along on the journey, making them feel comfortable, engaged, and empowered.

We look forward to you joining us!