Chris O'Dell
Senior Platform Engineer at Stack Overflow
London, United Kingdom
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Chris has spent over 20 years as a backend engineer at companies including Stack Overflow, Apple, Monzo, Contino and Just Eat. She has led teams delivering highly available Web APIs, distributed systems and cloud based services. She has also led teams developing internal build and deployment tooling with the goal of improving the developer’s experience. Chris promotes practices such as Continuous Delivery, including TDD, version control, and Continuous Integration.
www.chrisodell.me.uk
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/christineodell
Area of Expertise
Topics
How we support multi-cloud apps at Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow recently shifted to the cloud, hosting Teams and Enterprise on Azure and our public sites on GCP. This meant our services had to run seamlessly in both environments.
In this talk, I’ll share how our Platform Engineering team built the abstractions that make multi-cloud support easy for developers. Using Kubernetes as a common runtime, we standardised infrastructure metadata, created a Stack-specific flavour of the CNAB spec, and built Go-based CLI tools to simplify deployment. Our approach provides a layer between infrastructure and execution, minimising multi-cloud complexity for engineers.
I’ll cover both our philosophy and the technical details—highlighting what worked, what didn’t, and what we learned along the way.
You build it, you run it (why developers should also be on call)
Development of a feature doesn’t stop at deployment, your involvement continues for the lifetime of the product. If you want great power to control the choice of tooling and approaches, then you accept the great responsibility of ensuring it works, and remains working, in Production.
In this talk I’ll explore the topic of Developers supporting their own features in Production. I’ll cover the benefits of this approach, including greater understanding of your product, its usage and performance, and how this data can be fed back to improve your product. I’ll also talk about the downsides of being on-call, combined with the strategies from Ops teams on how to handle these. You’ll come away from this talk feeling empowered to own your own work.
What is a Microservice?
Over a decade has passed since the term "microservice" first emerged, and yet, many are still left wondering, "What exactly is a microservice?" Join us in this lighthearted talk as we embark on a journey to uncover the essence of microservices.
In this talk we will cover:
* The origin of Microservices: We'll start by unraveling the backstory of the term "microservice," which surprisingly traces back to a small event in Italy attended by James Lewis.
* Parallel Evolution: Microservices didn't emerge in isolation. We'll explore the concurrent development of alternative approaches by Adrian Cockcroft and Fred George.
* Building on Tradition: Microservices are not a revolution but rather an evolution from existing patterns of modular programming and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).
* What the Experts Say: We see what Wikipedia has to say about microservices. Explore the consensus among experts and the formal definition that has emerged over the years.
* Twitter's Take: Finally, we'll see what the tech community has to say by sharing insights and opinions from Twitter.
Norfolk Developers Conference 2024 Sessionize Event
NDC London 2018 Sessionize Event
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