Tyler McMullen of Fastly: Load Balancing is Impossible

We're delighted to have Tyler McMullen, Fastly's CTO, for a talk on load balancing, and the struggle between scalability and performance. If you don't know Fastly, they're a CDN that has disrupted the industry over the last few years. Fastly is operating at tremendous scale, but using component technologies that are in very broad use at sites from the small to the enormous. This should make for a talk from which we can get both an interesting perspective and some great practical advice. I'm really looking forward to it.

Pizza at 6:30, talk starting 7:15. See you all there.

Talk: Load Balancing is Impossible

Load balancing efficiently is a very hard problem. In fact, in the real world, doing it perfectly is impossible. Surprisingly, it’s also an issue that has serious latency implications for users. The techniques that most of us use, however, are far from the best we can do. We’ll talk about what makes load balancing hard, the problems with how we solve it right now, and techniques to do it better.

On the speaker: Tyler McMullen (https://twitter.com/tbmcmullen)is CTO at Fastly, where he’s responsible for the system architecture and leads the company’s technology vision. As part of the founding team, Tyler built the first versions of Fastly’s Instant Purging system, API, and Real-time Analytics. Before Fastly, Tyler worked on text analysis and recommendations at Scribd. A self-described technology curmudgeon, he has experience in everything from web design to kernel development, and loathes all of it. Especially distributed systems.