Agenda

Kubernetes systems are extremely powerful - providing highly distributed and sometimes infinite scale. However, this can also be a double-edged sword from an operations and management perspective. This talk will dive into some good practices for designing and embedding monitoring and observability best practices from day one for complex K8s microservices operations. These life lessons were learned firsthand from working with large-scale, microservices systems daily for the last four years and experiencing the challenges of troubleshooting and maintaining this complex system at scale. Tips I wish someone had shared with me when I was just getting started with microservices.

3 questions you should ask yourself before migration to K8s.

Multi-Model Thinking We tend to think in models, but if we only use one model we limit our ability to deal with reality properly. What if we add more models? This talk will allow you to consider different problems using different viewpoints, which ultimate will make you more diverse in the solutions you come up with.

Our day-to-day work relies on internal tools. We find a weak spot, we write a script or even a small program, and pass it along to our peers. Sometimes these tools are so useful our developers request we add more features and the list just keeps growing. In this presentation, we’ll explore how we changed our mindset and began relating to our developers as customers, and the internal tools we create as products. We’ll share the story of how this culture shift led us to build the Cloud Platform console that now consists of 10 different products (and more on the way). Our internal tools (products!) are built with the full product cycle of Build->Measure->Learn->Build. We gather continuous feedback, collect analytics, define KPIs, and continue to improve. We invested in a proper backend and frontend, and discovered that our developers love it! It shows them how seriously we take them and their needs. And this makes them want to join in the effort too, so we can all benefit from better, more effective, and powerful internal tools to use every day. In this lightning talk, we’ll give a quick overview of our journey towards building amazing team relationships which drive Outbrain's engineering velocity.

What is the most valuable outcome? This is the most important question to answer before starting an engineering metrics program. In this talk, I discuss which dev team metrics matter most, the outcome they produce, and pitfalls to avoid when starting a metrics initiative. The truth is no one really likes being measured especially devs but business leaders like looking at numbers so they grab what’s easily available like the number of code changes, agile velocity, and individual dev metrics. These types of metrics are unbalanced, exclude context, and hurt engineering culture as a whole. What you measure is what your team will produce. If you start measuring the number of code changes as a key performance metric, you are going to see coding time, PR size, and Cycle Time all increase. Don’t fall into this trap. In this session we’ll explore which team level metrics are most significant, the outcomes they produce, and strategies that will help you avoid the mistakes I’ve already made.

Once upon a time there was a deployment process. In spite of its young age, it had the responsibility to deploy a service to hundreds of servers in multiple data centers around the world. It performed well, but its young age was apparent - it used to fail from time to time and couldn’t explain exactly why. As time passed the process grew up, its framework was replaced with a new one, and many features were added to it. One day the process was asked to deploy an additional new service, and another one, and another one. At this point, it was required to perform a significant improvement. Join me for a short story about the coming of age of a deployment process.

They say there's no such thing as a talent shortage but building a great platform engineering team remains no easy feat. This talk will share lessons learned from firsthand experience to help you scale your platform teams and even help you think out of the box with your potential candidates. When companies start to scale, one of the core pieces of ensuring business continuity is the SLA of the infrastructure your applications are running on. When you're scaling a company from the ground up many times one of the greatest challenges is actually learning to grow your teams in a very competitive hiring landscape where there is a consistent talent shortage. In this talk, I will share my experience in building successful platform engineering teams over the last decade at a number of unicorns and global companies, across multiple time zones. How I identified the right candidates and sometimes candidates that were seemingly not the right fit, but delivered immense value. I'll dive into some of the common misconceptions and confusion around platform engineering vs. SRE, how to delegate roles and responsibilities that map to the right skill set, as well as how to measure success by defining the correct KPIs for your team.

Using Presidio (OSS) to detect and anonymize your PII entities

PayPal’s Cryptocurrency and Digital Asset Team (BCDC) encountered friction when deploying and managing their Infrastructure as Code. With the rapid growth of the digital asset and currency space, the team at PayPal began to feel the limitations and challenges of existing IaC and declarative orchestration tools. This talk will quickly summarize our key challenges, and how IaC management has positively impacted our processes, and improved developer and end-user experiences.

Building permissions is hard, most companies change their product`s permissions every 6 months. We'll share real war stories and will demonstrate how to apply permissions to any application in a fast and flexible way, using Permit.io / OSS tech and best practices.