[The Speakers] How efficiently develop a platform about connected cars

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Reply U / The Speakers

9 min readJul 3, 2018

Just two days to go to the biggest (and last) sessions of the #ReplyXchange18: after London and Munich, now it’s time for Milan! ,

The Xchange is our annual event where we present the state-of-art of tech, while trying to imagine the future of Automation, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Digital Experience, Intelligent Products & Services and Internet of Things… in other words, 4 days (in 3 different countries) all dedicated to innovation with more than 4,000+ participants and 140+ speeches by 250+ speakers!

And all following our knowledge sharing way of thinking, from Replyer to Replyer! ;)

But how does it feel to be a speaker at the Xchange and how can you become one? Few days ago Shyam told us his experience, with a look to the future of shopping and automation. Today let’s talk with Nico, from Concept Reply DE, speaker at the Xchange in Munich!

Hello there, Nico! To introduce you, what’s your role in Reply?

My career at Reply started at the end of my “Software Engineering and Management” studies when I got the chance to conduct and write my thesis here at Reply. The thesis’ focus was IoT so it was inevitable that I then started at Concept Reply, the IoT company within the Reply Network. At the time, Concept was still a very young Reply company and I was one of the first employees.
Today, more than three years later, we are close to 40 people.

It has been a great journey so far and I’m excited about what comes next!

My personal development and the development of the company are tightly connected. Being one of the first employees, from the first day I was given great responsibility. Everyone had to put in everything to ensure the growth and success of the company. This built the basis of the great team spirit, culture and mentality we have at Concept Reply today.

My skills also grew within the company. I started putting together small POCs and prototypes for customer acquisition and conferences using Raspberry PIs. Today I design and implement big scale cloud backends and applications. Moreover, the technology stack covers embedded, backend and frontend technologies. Meanwhile I can title myself a senior consultant and amongst other responsibilities, I’m in the lead of one of our projects managing a team of 6 people. Briefly speaking, I evolved from a fresh graduate to a project manager in less than three years, that’s quite cool, and I’m very proud of that! Without the support and sprit of Reply this would have never been possible.

You had a speech at the Xchange in Munich: what’s the topic?

My speech reflects upon a current customer case in the field of connected cars and future mobility. Reply, together with other companies, is building a new mobility use-case involving many microservices for drivers, passengers, and fleet operators as well as a cloud backend serving as the middle man between the individual parties. More specifically, Reply is responsible for implementing one of the core services, the so-called ride engine. The purpose of the ride engine is to match passenger requests with available drivers and car models.
While there are many interesting aspects about this mobility service and its unique features, in this talk I focus on the development process and tool chain, which enables efficient collaboration in the distributed team and cross organizational environment.

The goal of this speech is to inspire developers and DevOps engineers by showing them how such a project can use a common platform in order to reduce the overhead of the deployment, management and maintenance of microservices.

The platform is based on Kubernetes and Docker. But not only the deployment and management of microservices are in the focus of my speech. Also the usage of tools like GitLab as code and image repository and CI, Elastic Search and Kibana for logging and Prometheus and Graphana for Monitoring and Alerting are discussed. The technologies presented are quite state of the art, but they need to be put together in the right way in order to create a comprehensive and robust environment. The speech shows how those components were put together and explains the dos and don’ts we discovered during the setup and usage of the platform. The approach is to increase the automation level in all technical areas and to delegate architecture/conceptional design decisions into the teams who develop and operate their application, while providing as much recommendations and tools as reasonable/useful.

Oh, awesome! And how did you hear about containerized services first?

In former customer projects, I got in touch with Docker and Kubernetes before. But on a way smaller scale than we use it right now.
In the beginning it was difficult for me to grasp the benefits of those technologies. That was probably also caused by the lack of understanding and experience I had at the time 🤔.

Today I cannot think about a world without containerized services and application. It just makes my life so much easier. No more “you need to install this library and that configuration”, no more “well, it works on my machine…”. Now you just install the Docker engine on your machine, pull the image and start it. Done!

Also Kubernetes is such a powerful tool and I learn more about it every day. It also makes my life so much easier. I don’t have to think about resource management, scaling and orchestration of my containers anymore. And even way more things are possible when using Kubernetes to its full extend. I would recommend everyone to start learning about these technologies, it will be worth it.

And how did you feel while preparing and delivering your speech at the Xchange?

A couple of weeks back I was asked to prepare a speech for the AWS Dev Days in Berlin. A great opportunity and a big chance for me to speak in front of a big audience. That day there were around 150 people in Berlin listening to my speech. I think I had never talked in front of such a big crowd before.
The feedback I received was very positive and the feeling after the presentation was just awesome.
However, the preparation of the speech took much longer than I expected. Not only putting together the right content but also designing the slides took quite some time. In the end I actually finished the presentation the day of the event, 15 minutes before I had to go on stage 😅.
Luckily everything worked out fine!

After the success of the presentation at AWS, I decided to propose my speech for the Xchange. When I heard that it was accepted I knew I had to prepare much better this time. Of course I didn’t… Same story again. A couple of days before the event I finished the slides, which I had to update to fit the new audience and I cut down the presentation from 40 to 20 minutes. I think I practiced the speech once, but again, everything worked out perfectly. The feedback was throughout positive and I had many people approaching me after the talk in order to discuss the technologies I presented during my speech.

It was a great experience and I can warmly recommend it to everyone. Despite the time I had to invest in preparing the slides and the tension before the presentation, the feeling and feedback I got afterwards was definitely worth the effort. I would even say it’s kind of addictive and I’m already excited about my next speech 😅

Well, we will be there to hear you then ;) About Reply, how did the company support you in doing your research?

Most of the things I learn are of course based on the experience I gain from our customer projects.

But also with the help of the Reply Network, every day I have the opportunity educate myself and gain experience in new topics. Sometimes it’s just a post in our internal online company network TamTamy, sometimes it’s events such as Webinars, Labcamps or Hackathons.

Also internally at Concept Reply we are regularly organizing knowledge sharing sessions where colleagues share what they have learned in their current project. At the same time, I get the chance to join many conferences such as the AWS Summit or Google Cloud Days or take courses and certifications of technologies I want to learn.

No one is forcing you, neither stopping you to participate and educate yourself with the help of these events. It’s all up to you, everything is possible!

That’s absolutely right. Now long story short: 5 key facts we can’t miss!

containerized applications are saving you a lot of trouble with dependencies, runtime and management
Docker and Kubernetes can increase the automation level in all technical areas and help you to delegate architecture/conceptional design decisions into the teams who develop and operate their application
GitLab is a powerful Git-repository manager which will also help you with your Docker images and CI pipelines out of the box
use continuous integration/delivery/deployment to automate your workflow starting at pushing code (git-push) to the code repository and ending with the finally deployed application in production
force developers to manage their applications themselves with full access rights for deployments, monitoring, logging

What about the future?

In many of our projects we can already see a trend of microservice architectures based on Kubernetes and Docker. Leading cloud providers such as AWS, Azure and Google have already launched their own container management services to make it even easier for everyone to use these technologies.

This is a clear indication that in the future of software development the technology of containerized applications is inevitable.

The future approach for building services is to build “smaller” services that can be developed, deployed and scaled as independently as possible (i.e. Microservices). Each service must have a clear definition of its tasks. As functionality and services change and grow, the decisions have to be re-evaluated constantly and the services have to be refactored accordingly. This leads to the creation of new services as well as the removal of old services. In cases where latency matters, larger services may be developed. Those must be implemented in a modular way by using individual components that again have specific tasks, responsibilities and data ownership. In the end it is a design that needs to be made just like big services are made. Unfortunately, there is no right way to do it. It’s about analyzing the overall architecture and the experience of setting up such a system.

However, if these best practices are going to be ignored the chances are high that a system architecture based on containerized microservices will end up to be chaotic and will be doomed to fail its purpose.

Microservices and containers are not the solution for everything. It’s not like duck tape 😜. But used in the right setting, they are very powerful.

As a student, how can I learn more about it?

Whatever you are doing right now… throw away your books, forget about the theory and get your hands dirty. If you should dare to run Windows on your machine, burn or format it immediately, install Linux or just get yourself a MacBook. Then install Docker and Kubernetes (minikube) on your machine. Go online and checkout all the awesome tutorials and start hacking the shit out of your laptop:

Get an AWS or Goolge Cloud account, they are free for one year!

Check out their services, try to play around, build stuff, again follow tutorials. The worst that could happen is that you accidentally set up a huge EC2 instance and Amazon will bill you 300$ for it, but it’s totally worth the risk! Trust me! I’m telling you this from experience 😉 (to avoid such a pity, maybe just read up a little bit about the could services before you use them, the documentations are a little bit boring but extensive).

Think about a cool project, application or whatever and start building and developing it.

Here is an idea:
Build a small chat application based on Node.js and socket.io: https://socket.io/get-started/chat/, containerize it and deploy it on either AWS or Google and make it available to all your friends. If you want to be even cooler, create a vue.js app and make the chat application available on web and mobile phone http://vuetips.com/use-docker-containers.

Thank you Nico! One last thing: why a student should join Reply?

If you want to work in a 9 to 5 job, have unchallenging tasks, no chance for creativity, personal development and no responsibility — go to a big cooperate. Otherwise join Reply and I will guarantee you that we will together get all the potential out of you that’s in there. It’s a privilege to work here, so suit yourself!

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