3 Highlights from CloudNative London 2019 (Day 1)

There is much to be gained by simply spending time chatting with people and I would highly recommend this. But for this blog, I thought it would be helpful to highlight and give a shout out to some of the talks which I found interesting. Here are three talks from Day 1 at CloudNative London 2020 that I would recommend watching:

Keynote: It’s a Trap! Vendor Lock-in and the Cloud

Sam Newman

Sam Newman opened up CloudNative London 2019 with a look at the history of public cloud adoption. Highlighting that traditional data centres and private clouds still account for the majority of spending, the keynote questions our need for control and explores the idea of vendor lock-in.

I’ve spent a lot of time working in the Financial Services and FinTech spaces and there is often a strong feeling that the challenges in this sector are unique and we are somehow special. That specialised security, privacy and large scale data processing requirements automatically preclude being able to use more commoditised offerings.

This talk very much encourages us to question this reality. Are we really so special that we need to miss out on the benefits of the public cloud and struggle to build out our own private versions? It offers some good insight into the considerations and tradeoffs around this topic, specifically analysing the concerns about vendor lock-in as it relates to the adoption of the public cloud.

Click here to view the talk

Finding a Needle in a Call Stack – Intro to Distributed Tracing

Josh Michielsen

Experience has shown me that developing within a distributed architecture is inherently unreliable and as Josh highlights in his talk, a narrow focus on log and metric collection can only provide a limited view of individual services. Instead, he focuses on how good distributed tracing techniques and approaches can be used to unlock a more holistic view of your world. I recommend watching this talk to get an overview of tracing and an update on the CNCF OpenTelemetry project that will land up merging the CNCF OpenTracing and Google originating OpenCensus tracing specifications. The talk is nicely balanced by a demonstration of the Jaeger tracing platform that aims to complement the OpenTelemetry specification.

For me, this was a timely talk as I am in the process of helping a client implement various observability tools. It also got me thinking about whether or not distributed tracing would’ve helped me in past projects; particularly in large-scale distributed trading systems.

Click here to view the talk

Building a CloudPlatform at Nationwide Building Society

Aubrey Stearn

The last talk that I recommend watching was delivered by the CTO of Nationwide Aubrey Steam. The talk covers a lot of ground from technology choices and delivery practices (testable Infrastructure-As-Code) to culture and communication. Aubrey looks at every stage of delivery and focuses on establishing a culture that fosters ownership, team identity that is supported by the right level of governance.

This was an entertaining talk and I found it interesting to draw parallels with what we are doing with some of our clients in regulated markets, including trying to take some of the highly agile start-up techniques and applying it to them.

Click here to view the talk

Check out Day 2 and Day 3 highlights!

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