October 3, 2019

3 Highlights from CloudNative London 2019 (Day 2)

Continuing on from Stuart’s previous blog which covered highlights from CloudNative London conference day 1, I have put together a summary for day 2.

Being an OCer (OpenCredo employee) has given me the opportunity to fully embed myself in the London technology scene. Alongside our direct engagements with clients, it is a chance to understand and evaluate the trends and lessons that have emerged over the past year.

For conferences and technical content, London is a very crowded location. Every day it seems like a new conference is being announced and I know I cannot attend them all, no matter how much I want too! Alongside some of my other colleagues, I was given the option to attend the Skillsmatter CloudNative London conference and with the increase of organisations embracing the dynamic and transformative benefits offered by an ever-growing choice of cloud providers, it seemed like a good fit.

WRITTEN BY

Trent

Rosenbaum

Here are three sessions that made Day Two of CloudNative London a real pleasure to attend.

FaaS composition using Kafka and Cloud-Events

Neil Avery

Neil Avery, a technologist in the office of the CTO at Confluent, starts the talk by exploring how technology was once a supportive function but is now central to operating a business. He continues by looking at the complexities of handing state as well as scaling microservice architectures. Finally Neil covers how serverless functions can be choreographed together with event streaming platforms to address these complexities.

What I liked about this talk was the focus of bringing together loosely coupled cloud-based services and functions through Kafka topics and Confluent’s FaaS connectors. It demonstrated some of the best aspects of going, cloud native.

Click here to view the talk on SkillsCasts

Keynote: Is DevOps Still Relevant In A Cloud Native World?

Jez Humble

For me, a keynote with this title delivered by Jez Humble, (co-author of Continuous Delivery and The DevOps Handbook) is a must! The keynote explores the perceptions of DevOps and through the findings of the 2019 State of DevOps Report Jez focuses on three key areas; the measuring of delivery and operational performance, the challenges of architecting cloud platforms, and the influence of culture within an organisation.

This talk really resonated with me because “DevOps” is not a title for a single critical team within an organisation. The word for me embodies the practices and culture of software delivery. It is about bringing together cross-functional experience to build, operate and evolve our systems. High performing systems are produced by high performing teams, but high performance does not mean moving faster at the expense of stability and reliability. All three can be achieved through the right development culture.

Click here to view the talk on SkillsCasts

Keynote: Cultivating Production Excellence

Liz Fong-Jones

My last recommendation is the closing keynote by Developer Advocator and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Liz Fong-Jones from Honeycomb.io, who explores how to achieve production excellence.

The keynote strikes a strong balance between technical and human considerations while looking at Service Level Indicators and Objectives (SLI’s and SLO’s) to drive the understanding and alerting within complex systems. I’d recommend this to anyone who is looking to expand their knowledge of SRE practices and culture.

Click here to view the talk on SkillsCasts