Cloud Application Architectures: GOTO Aarhus, Denmark, October

Thanks to an invite via Michael Nygard, I ended up as a track chair for the GOTO Aarhus conference in Denmark in early October. The track subject is Cloud Application Architectures, and we have three speakers lined up. You can register with a discount using the code crof1000.

We are starting out with a talk from the Citrix Cloudstack folks about how to architect applications on open portable clouds. These implement a subset of functionality but have more implementation flexibility than public cloud services. [Randy Bias of Cloudscaling was going to give this talk but had to pull out of the trip due to other commitments].

To broaden our perspective somewhat, and get our hands dirty with real code, the next talk is a live demonstration by Ido Flatow, Building secured, scalable, low-latency web applications with the Windows Azure Platform.

In this session we will construct a secured, durable, scalable, low-latency web application with Windows Azure - Compute, Storage, CDN, ACS, Cache, SQL Azure, Full IIS, and more. This is a no-slides presentation!

Finally I will be giving my latest update on Globally Distributed Cloud Applications at Netflix.

Netflix grew rapidly and moved its streaming video service to the AWS cloud between 2009 and 2010. In 2011 the architecture was extended to use Apache Cassandra as a backend, and the service was internationalized to support Latin America. Early in 2012 Netflix launched in the UK and Ireland, using the the combination of AWS capacity in Ireland and Cassandra to create a truly global backend service. Since then the code that manages and operates the global Netflix platform is being released as a series of open source projects at netflix.github.com (Asgard, Priam etc.). The platform is structured as a large scale PaaS, strongly leveraging advanced features of AWS to deploy many thousands of instances. The platform has primary language support for Java/Tomcat with most management tools built using Groovy/Grails and operations tooling in Python. Continuous integration and deployment tooling leverages Jenkins, Ivy/Gradle, Artifactory. This talk will explain how to build your own custom PaaS on AWS using these components.

There are many other excellent speakers at this event, which is run by the same team as the global series of  QCon conferences, unfortunately, the cloud track runs at at the same time as Michael Nygard and Jez Humble on Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration, however I'm doing another talk in the NoSQL track, (along with Martin Fowler and Coda Hale). Running Netflix on Cassandra in the Cloud.

Netflix used to be a traditional Datacenter based architecture using a few large Oracle database backends. Now it is one of the largest cloud based architectures, with master copies of all data living in Cassandra. This talk will discuss how we made the transition, how we automated and open sourced Cassandra management for tens of clusters and hundreds of nodes using Priam and Astyanax, backups, archiving and performance and scalability benchmarks.

I'm looking forward to meeting old friends, getting to know some new people, and visiting Denmark for the first time.  See you there!