Talks

Agile delivery, DevOps and Cloud have been great enablers for digital businesses to achieve quicker time-to-market and innovate faster, in-turn helping them stay competitive in the market. Business growth aspirations implicitly depend heavily on the performance, scalability and reliability of underlying enterprise systems at growing user load. If a business plans to grow 10x whereas their as-is systems struggle to support even 2x load due to high latencies and poor scalability, then business growth is limited. In this talk we present how Performance-Ops can help architects and DevOps engineers continuously deliver expected system performance across the enterprise without compromising on the reliability and stability of their systems thus enabling business growth.

Cloud had been on the rise well before the pandemic, but cloud adoption achieved unprecedented growth during the past three years. This growth brought along an urgent need to improve security controls for secure access to cloud resources and cloud-native deployments. As a result, cloud security has become one of the fastest-growing segments in the IT security market.

A host of ideas come to mind whenever we hear the term "cloud security", but we struggle to organise them. More importantly, we find it difficult to structure them to gauge our current security posture. There is a lot of content available on cloud security, but most of it is from vendors talking about their services and tools. While these are helpful, they limit our perspective on the tool's effectiveness. In this talk, we will try to uncover those aspects and address what exactly cloud security means from the consumer's point of view and why it is crucial.

Though there is no such thing as perfect security protection, accepting some risks is necessary for leveraging public cloud services and ignoring these risks can be detrimental. We will discuss certain lenses which can enable us to design cloud security for achieving defence-in-depth and comply with zero trust architecture. We'll be primarily using references of AWS, but the concept can be extended to other clouds.

"With the evolution of DevOps, most of the organizations are moving towards Infrastructure as code. Whether it is cloud infrastructure, on-prem, configuration management, monitoring or containers, everything is provisioned and managed using code. Things become complicated and unmanageable when the scale of this code increases and the reason is that, in most organizations Infrastructure code is still managed the old way. With the increase in the scale of infrastructure code we also need to adopt software development practices for this code. Infrastructure code should be written with considerations of software coding principles like DRY, SOLID and may require to follow some design patterns to cater issues related to scale. Infrastructure code should also follow software delivery principles about versioning strategies, SAST, Unit Testing, Security Testing, Integration Testing, CI/CD and release processes. etc.

In this talk we will discuss some of these principles and how these can be applied to IaC taking Terraform as an example."

IoT as a technology became an essential need for many of the businesses as well as in automated home setup of everyday life. There are numerous real-world applications of the internet of things, ranging from consumer IoT and enterprise IoT to manufacturing and industrial IoT. As IoT devices use MQTT as one of the standard protocols, it is designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport that is ideal for connecting remote devices with a small code footprint and minimal network bandwidth.

We will walk you through our journey of scaling MQTT connections which helped our customer business, to shift capability from handling thousands of devices to millions of devices. This talk will also cover the challenges faced with the broker configurations, infrastructure , tools we used for running load tests against the setup and additional capabilities that are required to build a stable MQTT cluster for a high scale IoT platform.

Over the past decade we have seen the evolution of DevOps and essentially we have proven that it is definitely the game changer and this practice has empowered the overall software delivery over Agile. However while adopting the same practices and approaches at an enterprise level, we are clearly seeing the challenges in dealing with companies that have a big platform. So doing IaC is one thing where implementing and following the same practice across the platform is very much challenging.

Most of the people are using IaC at a project level of very small scale & forgetting the key code concept of DRY. This is essentially needed on the platform engineering to re-use the code across projects. Thus a major challenge arises, how to manage the code that can work with multiple projects when every project has a different type of configuration. Terraform is definitely great and at the same time it is painful while restructuring. However if we follow certain practices then we would definitely be able to avoid the future hurdles and problems.

Terrafile is a very simple wrapper tool that helps project teams to consume the platform common code and make use of certain versions of Terraform modules in a simple manner.

So we will see the following during the demo.

1. Problems with the project code structure.

2. Are we keeping the IaC code dry ?

3. Why I don't see Terragrunt the people are using as the best solution.

4. Demonstration of Terafile.