Build Stuff 2018

This talk is about our journey to Serverless at Trustpilot. It spans the past 2 years and dives into how we were able to successfully fast track the adoption of Serverless within our engineering organization. We'll share insights, architectural patterns and lessons learned on how we run Serverless functions in production today. This presentation hopefully inspires you to join the Serverless movement and gives you ideas and actionables on how to get started with Serverless in your company.

That thing that happens when your company is scaling so fast you have to replace your infrastructure within weeks or the whole thing crashes. This is what happened to our customer, and this is the story of how we replaced good-ol' SQL with streams and batch processing technologies on AWS.
Using Terraform, Packer, Elasticsearch, AWS Kinesis, Lambda and EMR we were able to provide a truly scalable solution in a matter of weeks, without hurting production and while dealing with a huge scale.
In this talk we will quickly go through the design phase, the various stake holders and how we improved their usage of the system, and introduce the tools that helped us make this happen.

Serverless introduces a number of challenges to existing tools for observability, we need to adapt our practices to fit this new paradigm. In this talk we will see how you can implement log aggregation, tracing and correlation IDs for a serverless application.

We have all seen the local demos of the "let it fail" philosophy that Erlang espouses, but what happens when you take that and apply it across a complete distributed system in production? What does it look like and how does it change the manner in which you then support it?

For the last several years, I have been working in a very small team, both building and deploying/supporting bespoke products that power upwards of half a million live video events a year, as well as forming the backbone of various television services across the UK. For some of our customers, it has been half a decade since we received a support call and indeed it is a virtual non-happening that anybody has to get out of bed to solve a problem in production. A lot of this results directly from our use of OTP, and there are then wider patterns that have arisen across our codebases and even the manner in which we provide support to our clients.

In this session, we will be using code and examples from real-world projects to demonstrate how we build, deploy, and then support hundreds of services/workloads across both the cloud and our on-premise high density units in production, as well as also covering how our software stack ensures that on a bad day, our services carry on delivering content even when servers are catching fire or somebody has spilled coffee on the datacentre power supply.

InSpec is an open source testing framework for infrastructure with a human- and machine-readable language for specifying compliance, security, and policy requirements.
Using a combination of command-line and remote-execution tools, InSpec can help you keep your infrastructure aligned with security and compliance guidelines on an ongoing basis, rather than waiting for and then remediating from arduous annual audits. InSpec’s flexibility makes it a key tool choice for incorporating security into a complete continuous delivery workflow, reducing the risk of new features and releases breaking established host-based security guidelines. This workshop covers the basics of working with InSpec, writing tests to reflect your organization’s security guidelines, consuming community security profiles, and managing InSpec as part of a high-velocity workflow.

DevOps is the implementation of continuous delivery and agile concepts across the organization, focusing on pipelines as the main building blocks for delivery value internally and to the customer.
But getting to that state is complicated because it requires several facets of work: People, process and tools.
In large organizations ,we have the added complexity of :
" Multiple dependencies and sub systems
" Multiple teams, groups, business units with competing interests
" Varying degrees of agility, culture, tools, technologies and processes
" Security, compliance and policy gates

In this talk we will discuss main patterns and anti patterns for adopting and implementing DevOps pipelines throughout the organization.

For almost a decade "Infrastructure as Code" has been a DevOps buzzword - but the myriad tools in share a dirty little secret... there's no actual code! Few people like "programming" YAML or JSON (even the human-friendly variants!), and even fewer like having to reverse-engineer ways to apply known good development practices to tools which resist it at all cost.

So, what if things were different,and programming infrastructure was more like real programming, with real programming languages like TypeScript? What if you defined Lambda functions by actually writing lambdas, created abstractions using complex types, and could take advantage of existing tools for modularity, linting, refactoring and testing?

Enter Pulumi, an open-source deployment engine which enables all these things using TypeScript, Python or Go!

In this talk, we'll look at how you can write TypeScript code using Pulumi to provision traditional cloud infrastructure, manage Kubernetes and build portable "serverless" applications - all with minimal YAML in sight! We'll look at deploying to multiple regions of the same cloud, and how to build abstractions allowing multi-cloud to be a reality.

Pre-written code that, like tiny bricks of lego, can add features to your application or workflow?! Join Karl-Henrik Nilsson and learn how logic apps contribute to everything from keeping inbox zero to features for new apps and how he uses it to get away from helping friends and family!

Getting started with AWS Lambda is easy, but understanding the operational challenges and tradeoffs is a much more nuanced topic, and one that you need to grasp before you can be confident in operating a serverless architecture responsibly. Come to this workshop and learn all about Serverless ops.