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layout title subtitle category tags author author_email header-img
post Summary of QCon New York, 2016 Impressions, links and summaries of QCon New York conference
qcon
culture
devops
microservices
holger_reinhardt holger.reinhardt@haufe-lexware.com images/bg-post.jpg

Here is a quick summary of my highlights of QCon New York from June 13th to June 15th, 2016. The following are the notes from sessions I attended. To make it easy to pick the most interesting ones, I grouped them according to topics. Slides from other presentations can be downloaded directly from the QCon Schedule

Culture
Devops
Architecture
Security

Implementing Infrastructure as Code

  • Description and slides
  • Website at http://infrastructure-as-code.com
  • Motivations:
    • speed: get something to market fast, iterate, continuously improve it
      • heavy process to reduce danger vs everything goes
      • goal: be able to make changes rapidly, frequently and responsibly
    • challenges
      • server sprawl: config drift, automation fear cycle
  • Infrastructure-as-Code:
  • Think about duplication
    • Re-use by forking: divergence vs decoupling
    • Sharing elements avoid monoliths - optimize to simplify changes

Think before you tool

Security in cloud environments

How to optimize your culture for learning

  • Description
  • About creating high learning environments in Recurse
  • Company mantra 'You are doing your thing at your time, and we bring the place and the community'
  • RC is partnering with companies:
    • value for participants improve their software skills,
    • value to companies: hiring access
  • Motivation
    • Fear is an obstacle to learning
      • People don’t want to look stupid
      • Create a positive feel around ‘I do not know’
      • RC social rules to reduce fear
        • No feigning surprise (What, you don't know?)
        • No “well, actually” (do not correct details which are irrelevant for the conversation)
        • No backset driving (lobbying criticism over the wall without participating)
        • No subtle-isms (no racism, sexism, even in a subtle way: where do you really come from?)
  • What works for us
    • Being transparent about our beliefs re-enforces learning
    • Being vocal about our values
    • Treat people like adults
      • Don't need to check in on people every day
      • Choice to participate in activities, meetings, etc vs mandating participation
  • Key message
    • Hire attitude over skill
    • You can learn any skill, but you can’t learn curiosity

Learnings from a culture first startup

  • Description
  • About creating the right culture at Buffer
  • How do we know how to build a good culture
  • What is culture
    • In every team: the explicit and implicit behaviors which are valued by the team
    • Evolves and changes with each hiring
    • Best teams carefully manage culture
  • At buffer culture is as important as the product
    • The result are our buffer values
    • Crafting culture is hard: you hire for culture, you should be firing for culture
    • Build the core team which aligns on culture
      • Interviews/hiring around culture fit
      • Spend less time convincing people, more time finding people who are already convinced
    • In order to hire for cultural fit, the team has to be on the same page
    • Lessons learnt from experimenting with culture
      • Transparency breeds trust (for team and customers)
      • Implementing culture for a globally distributed team
        • Can hire the best people in the world
        • Hard to brainstorm (teams need mini-retreats)
        • Harder to get on the same page
        • Hard to disengage from work when working through Timezones
      • Cultivate culture for remote work
        • Need to be self-motivated and genuinely passionate about your work
        • Need to be resourceful, can get through roadblocks
        • But hard time to hire juniors/interns
        • Written communication is our main medium
          • But can’t replace in-person interactions: We have retreats
      • Make mistakes, keep tight feedback loops, iterate fast
        • Growing a remote team without managers was a bad choice
        • Instead of hiding mistakes, we share them openly
        • There are no balanced people, only balanced teams
          • Culture fit -> culture contribution
          • Its the leaders job to hire for balance
          • Hiring for culture fit assumes that culture is perfect and static
          • See http://diversity.buffer.com
            • A/B testing to attract different demographics
            • Taking hiring risks consciously (instead of reducing it)
              • Everyone is hired for a 45 day work bootcamp (full-time contracting period)
      • Can’t copy other cultures
      • Culture as differentiator (from 300 to 4000 job applicants)

Container mgmt at Netflix

  • Description and Slides
  • Running container on AWS results in loosing EC2 metadata and IAM control
  • Lesson: making container act like VMs
    • Implemented EC2 Metadata Proxy to bridge EC2 metadata into container
    • Why?
      • Amazon service sdk’s work
      • Service discovery continues to work
  • Lesson: Image Layering
    • Engineering tool team generates base images (blessed, secured) for app envs (i.e. node.js)
    • Application images are derived from base image

Cryptocurrency key storage

  • Description
  • How cryptocurrency is stored at Coinbase
  • Sharding of crypto keys using shamir secret sharing
  • Using cold and hot storage (consensus access)
    • Cold storage
      • Most of the crypto currency is stored in cold storage (disconnected)
      • Generated on hardware never connected to the internet
      • Stored on usb
      • Private key is being split into shards and encrypted independently
      • Restoring private key requires majority of shards (individual parts can go rogue)
      • Example: Ethereum Cold Storage for smart contracts
        • 4 of 7 can retrieve the contract
        • 6 of 7 can change the contract
    • Hot storage
      • Fully insured
      • Ssingle server requiring a quorum of senior engineers to unlock/unscramble
  • Multisig Vault
    • https://www.coinbase.com/multisig
    • Cold Storage as-a-Service (User Key, Shared Key, Coinbase Key)
      • User needs paper and passphrase
      • m-of-n sharding of key is possible

What they do not tell you about microservices

  • Description and Slides
  • See also
  • Good pragmatic steps for evolving from monolith to microservice architecture
    • After split Postgres started to break down with connection pooling, used an external connection pooler like https://pgbouncer.github.io
    • Choose mesos/marathon
    • Thrift-based macro services
    • Smart pipes vs context-aware apps
      • Decoupling application from service discovery
        • (v1) curator framework from Netflix brought into Zookeeper
        • (v2) hibachi by dotCloud (dedicated routing hosts)
        • (v3) haproxy
        • Marathon has built-in routing concept using haproxy (generates haproxy config)
        • Started using qubit bamboo
        • Can iterate routing and discovery independently from application, but run into scale problem around 300 service (square on every service needs to know every other service and health)
        • Moving back to topology of (v2) but with HAProxy
    • Continious Integration/ Continious Deployment CI/CD
    • Container make things more simple but leave mess behind
    • Monitoring
      • Graphite and Grafana
        • Did not scale, since every team had to build own dashboard
        • Too much manual effort and no alerting
      • Switched to New Relic
        • Fully monitored if agent is present
        • Goal was 100 apps in 100 days
    • Source code management
      • Using Hound to help with code searching
      • Using GitRepo to help keep repos up to date
    • Human service discovery
      • Using Sentinel for developer finding services

Lessons learned on Ubers journey into microservices

The deadly sins of microservices