My takeaways from this year’s O’Reilly Velocity Conference in Berlin.

Diversity in tech can be achieved, and it feels great

O’Reilly deserves an absolute chapeau for making an effort for diversity. The conference had a close to even ratio of inspiring female speakers. People of color, LGBT and more were well represented on stage, which also gave the entire conference a good vibe. While there were some local representatives, it looks like currently the price of diversity is flying in many speakers from the States, though. I really hope for a different near future.

James Mickens from Harvard giving a great “love letter to computer science” keynote talk/poem (curtesy of O’Reilly)

Builders who try serverless fall in love and want to talk about it

While not an official Velocity topic, “serverless” cannot be ignored. I attended two serverless sessions in the conference, both illustrated great use cases where the teams had their first attempts with serverless and seem to have been convinced.

• Julia Biro from Contentful presented a great use case of AWS Lambda@Edge. The solution allowed for a reliable and stable architecture while keeping very low costs and requiring zero to very little maintenance. As with most serverless integrations, the team went through an iterative journey of acquiring the knowledge and finding ways to go serverless while adapting it to the way they understand software development and infrastructure. The team then started using serverless in additional projects.
• Brian Young from Penguin Random House presented a very impressive book email recommendations platform his team built. PRH was able to build a solution capable of sending more than 10 million emails a day while paying very little for idle time (most of the time). They created an extensive CloudFormation templates library facilitating full IaC with multiple environments including per-branch builds and many other nice developer tooling features.

A Slide from Julia Biro’s talk displaying Contenful’s solution for S3 resilience using Lmbda@Edge

My takeaways:

• Serverless is awesome.
• Teams who try it immediately look for the next possible use case.
• The tooling and framework scene is still setting in. Many teams also use plain CloudFormation/terraform and skip using one of the available serverless application frameworks.

At Ideas Engineering we’ve also been playing around with serverless. We had a serverless workshop in our yearly off-site (creating an awesome image classifier in two hours using AWS and the serverless framework). We then built the Axel Springer Kudos (runs serverlessly on a pay-as-you-go model) application to promote a culture of gratitude in the company.

Configuration is code, and it’s possibly a very risky one

My favorite session in this year’s conference was Configuration is riskier than code? by Jamie Wilkinson (SRE at Google). He made a strong case for configuration is code and therefore should be treated as code (i.e. review, test, treat it with care etc.). This is very relevant for the trending IaC concept. He made a great session looking into the subject both from the CS theoretical point of view and from the practical one. Jamie brought interesting evidence for configuration being responsible for many large-scale system failures (as we fail to treat it as code and test it well), and I got many ideas regarding how we can test configuration and try to mitigate those failures. This made it clearer to me why I like the new AWS CDK approach where IaC (CloudFormation) is automatically produced from Typescript modules.