Ever wondered how they do it? Next-gen architectures from the most admired companies in software, such as Netflix, Google, BBC, Twitter, & more.
Track: Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Location: Fleming, 3rd flr.
Day of week: Monday

Track Host: Charles Humble
Charles Humble took over as head of the editorial team at InfoQ.com in March 2014, guiding the content creation including news, articles, books, video presentations and interviews. Prior to taking on the full-time role at InfoQ, Charles led our Java coverage, and was CTO for PRPi Consulting, a renumeration research firm that was acquired by PwC in July 2012. For PRPi he had overall responsibility for the development of all the custom software used within the company. He has worked in enterprise software for around 20 years as a developer, architect and development manager. In his spare time he writes music as 1/3 of London-based ambient techno group Twofish, whose debut album came out in February 2014 after 14 years of messing about with expensive toys, and spends as much time as he can with his wife and young family.
10:35am - 11:25am
Airbnb’s Great Migration: Building Services at Scale
So you’ve decided to migrate from monolith to microservices, what next? Such a redesign to service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a long, arduous journey that benefits from an incremental, iterative approach. Yet, such a migration often must be done while still shipping new features, accelerating developer velocity, and growing the team in addition to ensuring there are no performance regressions.
This talk recaps my QCon SF 2018 “Great Migration” presentation then continues the story with a focus on how Airbnb is building, operating, and scaling its expanding network of services. Though our re-architecture to SOA is still ongoing, we are already seeing various benefits including improved performance, developer productivity, build and deploy times, and site reliability.
Key takeaways:
- Understand design principles for building scalable, performant services
- Plan for dependencies: how to sequence decomposition into services and an API gateway
- Learn best practices for standardization, reliability, and performance when migrating architecture
- Identify ways to shift product culture to empower migration work
- Recognize tradeoffs with operating microservices
11:50am - 12:40pm
Real World Examples of FaaS
Cloudflare launched Cloudflare Workers over a year ago bringing the ability to run JavaScript and then any WASM-targetting language on our 165+ locations around the world. Since then many companies have built functions and applications using Cloudflare Workers. This talk will look at real world examples, not proofs-of-concept or textbook ideas, of what's being built using this new architecture.
1:40pm - 2:30pm
BBC iPlayer: Architecting for TV
TV apps have seen an explosion in usage over the last few years as audiences start the slow migration away from traditional broadcast viewing. For iPlayer, TV has become the dominant platform, with over half of iPlayer consumption coming from the biggest screen in the house via thousands of models of smart TVs, streaming sticks, games consoles and set top boxes. Achieving universal reach — whilst also pushing the boundaries of experience — comes at a price however. In this talk we explore the challenges of TV application development; from our early days chasing new native experiences, to the development of our open source libraries and standards-based certification. We’ll also touch on the next steps for iPlayer as we blur the lines between broadcast and IP television.
2:55pm - 3:45pm
What We Got Wrong: Lessons from the Birth of Microservices
Google deserves a lot of credit for imagining (and popularizing) what we now call "microservice architectures." That said, hindsight is 20/20, and many of the mistakes we made at Google are being recreated by the rest of the industry today. What did we get wrong about microservices at Google, and how can we apply those lessons today?
5:25pm - 6:15pm
Life of a Packet Through Istio
Istio is a service mesh for Kubernetes that offers advanced networking features. It provides intelligent routing, resiliency, and security features, so that service authors don’t have to keep re-implementing them. Istio is rapidly taking off and there are great introductory talks everywhere. However, in this session, we will dive deep to explore precisely how it does what it does, following one brave little packet in from the internet and back out again. At each point, we’ll see how to configure the features of that component to exploit istio’s full potential. This will give a great insight into Istio’s full power, and its fascinating architecture.
Last Year's Tracks
Monday, 2 March
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Next Generation Microservices: Building Distributed Systems the Right Way
Microservice-based applications are everywhere, but well-built distributed systems are not so common. Early adopters of microservices share their insights on how to design systems the right way.
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Streaming Data Architectures
Today's systems process huge volumes of continuously changing data. Hear how the innovators in this space are designing systems and leveraging modern data stream processing platforms.
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Driving Full Cycle Engineering Teams at Every Level
"Full cycle developers" is not just another catch phrase; it's about engineers taking ownership and delivering value, and doing so with the support of their entire organisation. Learn more from the pioneers.
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When Things Go Wrong: GDPR, Ethics, & Politics
Privacy, confidentiality, safety and security: learning from the frontlines, from both good and bad experiences
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JavaScript: Pushing the Client Beyond the Browser
JavaScript is not just the language of the web. Join this track to learn how the innovators are pushing the boundaries of this classic language and ecosystem
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Modern CS in the Real World
Head back to academia to solve today's problems in software engineering.
Tuesday, 3 March
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Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Hard-earned lessons from the names you know on scalability, reliability, security, and performance.
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The Future of the API: REST, gRPC, GraphQL and More
The humble web-based API is evolving. This track provides the what, how, and why of future APIs.
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Building High Performing Teams
There are many discussions outlining the secret sauce of high-performing teams. Learn how to balance the essential ingredients of high performing teams such as trust and delegation, as well as recognising the pitfalls and problems that will ruin any recipe.
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Machine Learning: The Latest Innovations
AI and machine learning is more approachable than ever. Discover how ML, deep learning, and other modern approaches are being used in practice.
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Bare Knuckle Performance
Crushing latency and getting the most out of your hardware.
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Modern Compilation Targets
Learn about the innovation happening in the compilation target space. WebAssembly is only the tip of the iceberg.
Wednesday, 4 March
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Growing Unicorns in the EU: Building, Leading and Scaling Financial Tech Start Ups
Learn how EU FinTech innovators have designed, built, and led both their technologies and organisations.
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Kubernetes and Cloud Architectures
Learn about cloud native architectural approaches from the leading industry experts who have operated Kubernetes and FaaS at scale, and explore the associated modern DevOps practices.
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Chaos and Resilience: Architecting for Success
Making systems resilient involves people and tech. Learn about strategies being used, from cognitive systems engineering to chaos engineering.
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Leading Distributed Teams
Remote and distributed working are increasing in popularity, but many organisations underestimate the leadership challenges. Learn from those who are doing this effectively.
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Scaling Security, from Device to Cloud
Implementing effective security is vitally important, regardless of where you are deploying software applications
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Evolving Java
JVM futures, JIT directions and improvements to the runtimes stack is the theme of this year’s JVM track.