Operational Software Design

There are two common tenets of operations: "hell is other people's software," and "better software is produced by those forced to operate it." In this session I'll take a fly-by-tour of two pieces of software that were built from the ground up for operability from the hard-earned teachings of their inoperable predecessors: a distributed datastore replacing PostgreSQL, and a message queue replacing RabbitMQ.

We'll discuss specific design aspects that increase resiliency in the event of failure and observability at all times.

After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins University in computer science with a focus on randomized algorithms in distributed systems, Theo went on to research resource allocation techniques in distributed systems during four years of post-graduate work. Since starting OmniTI in 1997, Theo has gone on to found three software companies and produce and participate in countless open source projects.

A widely respected industry thought leader, Theo is the author of Scalable Internet Architectures (Sams) and is a frequent speaker at worldwide IT conferences. Theo is a computer scientist in every respect. Theo is a member of the ASF, the IEEE and a senior member of the ACM.