Hard-earned lessons from the names you know on scalability, reliability, security, and performance.
Track: Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Location: Fleming, 3rd flr.
Day of week: Tuesday

Track Host: Wes Reisz
Wesley Reisz is the VP of Technology at Section (an Edge Compute Platform focused on rethinking how the edge is used in DevOps-focused application development). Wes also chairs the LFEdge Landscape Working Group and the San Francisco edition of QCon.
Before joining Section, Wes served as the product owner for all of the English speaking QCon conferences worldwide, was a principal architect with HP Enterprise Systems, and, for over 13 years, taught as an adjunct professor for the University of Louisville (Go Cards!).
At HPE, Wes’ primary roles supported the US Army’s Human Resources (HRC), Recruiting, and Cadet Support Commands based at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Wes was the Principal Architect for US Army Cadet Command and was known for championing, building, and deploying enterprise portal and identity solutions used by Army Recruiting.
In addition to Wes’ current roles, he co-hosts a weekly podcast called The InfoQ Podcast. The InfoQ Podcast serves senior early adopter/early majority developers and architects with interviews from some of software’s most important thought leaders. The podcast has been downloaded over 1.5 million times and has a weekly listener base of around 14K.
10:35am - 11:25am
Evolution of Financial Exchange Architectures
The Disruptor was announced 10 years ago. A concurrent library for the Java programming language which provided a low-latency, high-throughput means to do asynchronous event processing as a central component to the LMAX's architecture.
In the 10 years since Disruptor, Financial Exchange Architectures have continued to evolve. In this talk, Martin Thompson, then the co-founder and CTO for LMAX who created Disruptor, discusses what's happened since. He will look at the evolution of financial exchanges and explore what is considered state of the art today.
11:50am - 12:40pm
Managing Systems in an Age of Dynamic Complexity
Why is it that a single server can often have better uptime than a public cloud service?
We used to manage systems. Instead, many of us now write and run dynamic control planes: the systems that run our user-facing systems. We find the dynamic control plane pattern in software-defined networking, in service meshes, in some load balancers, and in job orchestration systems.
This talk looks at the common architectural shapes of dynamic control planes, and some examples of how they fail spectacularly—many major cloud outages are caused by dynamic control plane issues. Why are dynamic control planes so hard to run, and what can we do about it?
1:40pm - 2:30pm
Lessons From DAZN: Scaling Your Project with Micro-Frontends
Micro-frontends are a new architectural trend in the development of frontend applications. This architectural style can provide several benefits to your projects and organization, offering a level of decoupling never seen before in single-page applications or universal architectures. That said, micro-frontends need to be explored in practice.
Based on his work at DAZN, Luca Mezzalira explains how to implement micro-frontends, enabling you to scale up a project with tens of developers without reducing the throughput.
2:55pm - 3:45pm
eBPF - Rethinking the Linux Kernel
The Linux kernel is undergoing the most fundamental architecture evolution in history and is becoming a microkernel. Why is the Linux kernel evolving into a microkernel? The potentially biggest fundamental change ever happening to the Linux kernel. This talk covers how companies like Facebook and Google use BPF to patch 0-day exploits, how BPF will change the way features are added to the kernel forever, and how BPF is introducing a new type of application deployment method for the Linux kernel.
4:10pm - 5:00pm
Tesla Virtual Power Plant
A Virtual Power Plant (VPP) is a network of distributed energy-resources (often solar, wind, and batteries) that are aggregated to provide smarter and more flexible power generation, distribution, and availability. A VPP leverages assets for more than one purpose, and, in doing so, decentralizes generation, enables market participation for small generators, increases grid reliability, and smooths the intermittency of renewable generation while improving the economics of renewables.
Tesla's VPP consists of vertically integrated hardware and software, including both cloud and edge computing. The Tesla Energy infrastructure platform ingests and aggregates telemetry from tens of thousands of assets, including Powerwalls, Powerpacks, and Megapacks, with low latency, and robustly distributes control commands, handling measurement uncertainty and network intermittency. Tesla Autobidder leverages this infrastructure platform to optimize diverse asset fleets, decomposing the optimization algorithm across edge and cloud intelligence.
This talk will explore the evolution of Tesla's VPP architecture, including:
- The use of distributed, actor-model programming for virtually representing physical assets and performing low-latency, hierarchical aggregations of telemetry.
- Managing complex workflows for forecasting, optimization, bidding, and control that must be predictable, reliable, and resilient under market-timing, algorithmic, and physical constraints. These workflows must handle diverse inputs, including inputs from third parties, that are only eventually consistent.
- Using Reactive Streams for reliably interfacing disparate systems, respecting resource constraints, and managing high-volume, near-real-time data streams.
- Introducing functional programming techniques to make the software more composable, reliable, and testable.
- Trade-offs between training and running global and local forecasting and optimization models.
- The development of responsive user-interfaces for operations and energy-market participation.
5:25pm - 6:15pm
Designing a Real-Time Global Sportsbook (From Scratch!)
Have you ever found yourself working on an established product and secretly wishing you could start it all again from scratch? Given the chance to pick from modern languages, platforms and technologies, how would you design your dream architecture?
12 months ago we were given this opportunity when we were tasked with taking our experience scaling skybet.com into a product that easily supported 25K bets per minute and starting a brand new sports betting product from scratch. The big difference, this time we are rolling out our product globally.
This talk will look at the lessons we've learned from building and operating skybet.com for the UK market and how we're building our new global product using technologies such as Kotlin, Kafka, RSocket and ReactJS. We'll look at our requirements to build systems to support low-latency, high throughput trading right through to real-time, personalised content for our customers and talk through the architectural patterns and technologies we have used.
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.