Growing Resilience: Serving Half a Billion Users Monthly at Condé Nast

Serving over half a billion monthly customers while keeping service availability high is a monumental task. Condé Nast operates in nearly 40 countries and is better known for it’s portfolio of household brands such as Vogue, Wired, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker. Our globally distributed platforms run more than 15 Kubernetes clusters in more than 5 geographic regions, runs a multi-CDN / edge architectures, employs a micro services approach, multi-tenanted web applications, high throughput data streaming architectures just to outline some of the technical challenges that we implement and operate on a daily basis.

 

Many of us are facing these challenges - so how do we cultivate and grow our organisation's capacity to adapt to the unknown in ever fluid, dynamic socio-technical systems? In this talk I will outline how Condé Nast practices Chaos engineering, where this fits within the already established testing and verification ecosystem, and what emergent practices and tools are on the horizon. Observability is at the core of understanding and drawing inferences about our systems. We’ll dispel some myths about touted "Best Practices” for Observability, looking beyond to emergent trends in signals, metrics, and tracing. Last but not least, I’ll cover how to build up your organisation’s true superpower: Human Resilience.