QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.

Training: "Cloud Architecture"

Track: Tutorial / Time: Monday 09:00 - 16:00 / Location: Westminster

Starting with the usual questions:""Why Netflix, why cloud, why AWS?""

This tutorial explains which business models and applications benefit most from cloud, what to look for in a cloud provider, and how the traditional enterprise computing marketplace is being disrupted.

Moving on to the next question: ""What can run in the cloud?"" a step by step approach to cloud migration is described, along with a varied set of use cases for both customer facing and internal web services, big data analytics and bulk computation. Cloud migration starts by moving developers to work on cloud using ""boot camp"" training sessions, then after building out the initial core platform, the first applications are launched.

The real meat of the tutorial comes when we look at how to construct an application with a host of important properties: elastic, dynamic, scalable, agile, fast, cheap, robust, durable, observable, secure. Over the last three years Netflix has figured out cloud based solutions with these properties, deployed them globally at large scale and refined them into a global Java oriented Platform as a Service. The PaaS is based on low cost open source building blocks such as Apache Tomcat, Apache Cassandra, and Memcached. Components of this platform are in the process of being open-sourced by Netflix, so that other companies can get a start on building their own customized PaaS that leverages advanced features of AWS and supports rapid agile development.

The architecture is described in terms of anti-patterns - things to avoid in the datacenter to cloud transition. A scalable global persistence tier based on Cassandra provides a highly available and durable under-pinning. Lessons learned will cover solutions to common problems, availability and robustness, observability. Attendees should leave the tutorial with a clear understanding of what is different about cloud architectures, why, what and how to make the transition, and a set of flexible and scalable open source building blocks that can be used to construct their own cloud platform.

Adrian Cockcroft, Director of architecture for the Cloud Systems team at Netflix

Adrian Cockcroft

Biography: Adrian Cockcroft

Adrian Cockcroft is the director of architecture for the Cloud Systems team at Netflix. He is focused on availability, resilience, performance, and measurement of the Netflix cloud platform, and has presented at many conferences, including QCon San Francisco, Beijing and Tokyo. Adrian is also well known as the author of several books while a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems: Sun Performance and Tuning; Resource Management; and Capacity Planning for Web Services.

From 2004-2007 he was a founding member of eBay Research Labs. He graduated with a BSc in Applied Physics from The City University, London.  

Twitter: @adrianco