Track: Architectures You've Always Wondered About

10:35am - 11:25am

Exploring Evolving Financial Exchange Architectures

Just about ten years ago, we were introduced to Disruptor. A library for the Java programming language that provided a concurrent ring buffer data structure of the same name, Distuptor was designed to provide a low-latency, high-throughput work queue in asynchronous event processing architectures and was central component to LMAX's architecture. 

In the 10 years since Disruptor, Financial Exchange Architectures has 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 today's state of the art.

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

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

The 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

Architectures

Details to follow.