John Looney, Intercom, and Theo Schlossnagle, Circonus
All distributed systems make tradeoffs and compromises. Different designs behave very differently with respect to cost, performance, and how they behave under failure conditions.
It's important to understand the tradeoffs that the building blocks in your systems make, and the implications this has for your system as a whole. In this workshop we'll look at several examples of different real-world distributed systems and discuss their strengths and shortcomings.
This workshop will include some practical elements. You will be given some system designs to read and to evaluate, and then we'll discuss the implications of each design together as a group.
John Looney, Intercom
John Looney did 24x7 support for a webhosting company, spent nearly 12 years in Google as an SRE (compute, storage, datacenters and Ads) as well as running team-build courses. He is now applying SRE to Intercom's infrastructure. He is passionate about ensuring that engineers know the best use of their time and energy, but still hasn't worked out how to not burn himself out occasionally.
Theo Schlossnagle, Circonus
Theo Schlossnagle is the founder and CEO of Circonus. Previously, he founded OmniTI, the go-to source for organizations facing today’s most challenging scalability, performance, and security problems; was the Founder of Message Systems, Inc. now Sparkpost; and researched distributed systems at JHU. Theo is the author of Scalable Internet Architectures (Sams) and a frequent speaker at IT conferences worldwide. He is a member of the IEEE and a senior member of the ACM and serves on the editorial board of the ACM’s Queue magazine. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science from Johns Hopkins University.
author = {John Looney and Theo Schlossnagle},
title = {Distributed Systems Reasoning},
year = {2017},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}