The theme of TechSummit 2016 Berlin and Amsterdam is “Designing for Scalability”. But what do we really mean by the word “scalability”?
Well, we’re all familiar with the standard definition along the lines of Wikipedia’s definition: “The capability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work… A system whose performance improves after adding hardware, proportionally to the capacity added, is said to be a scalable system.”
Just in case – or just in time?
So, primarily, scalability is a way for businesses to use resources in the most cost effective way. Rather than having to over-specify hardware just in case the extra capacity is needed one day, they invest in scalable systems which can be scaled up (or down) in a just in time way – as and when they are needed.
Getting flexible with scalability
As a prime business driver these days, this concept of scalability is central to system design and development these days – which is why we chose it as a theme for TechSummit 2016. But we’re adopting a pretty broad interpretation of the term in our presentations which cover many different aspects of what scalability means.
Scalability and load balancingSoundCloud Engineer Matthias Rampke, for instance, will be looking at the role of load balancing in scalable systems. He explains: “We will take a closer look at IPVS for Layer 4 connection load balancing, HAProxy for Layer 7 HTTP load balancing, with honorable mentions for ECMP and SoundCloud’s service discovery mechanism. For each, we will see which use cases they excel in, when and how they break down, and what to watch out for.”
Leaseweb on scalabilityLeaseweb speakers include Arnoud Vermeer and Joshua Hoffman. Joshua will pick up on some of those things “to watch out for” in his presentation entitled “The seven deadly sins of web scale”. Using real life examples and case studies he’ll walk us through some of the pitfalls to avoid when scaling apps. And Arnoud will describe how we scaled our entire engineering department using agile techniques.
Encrypt Yourself: Opsec for DevelopersWe’re also proud to have Jessy Irwin on stage, explaining which tools and operational practices individual developers should use to protect their work. “In this introduction to secure, usable encryption tools, everyone will learn something about protecting themselves, their data, and their identities from some of the most common threats online today.”
So you see there are many different aspects to the scalability topic. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Many other speakers throughout the day will be sharing their tech secrets so why not come down to the TechSummit Amsterdam and scale up your tech knowledge!
TechSummit Amsterdam
2 June, Pakhuis de Zwijger Amsterdam
Tickets only €25,-
Amsterdam.techsummit.io