Crossing the Chasm: The Journey of The New York Times Internal Developer Platform from Conception to

Our cloud strategy promotes platform centralization, challenging prior team autonomy. This talk shares insights on our platform journey, guiding attendees in implementing similar strategies.

What we learned designing & securing a multi-tenant developer platform at The New York Times

Building and architecting a secure, user-friendly, scalable developer platform within the cloud is challenging. This is especially true when your internal users may not have a strong incentive to use it over their current toolset.

Our cloud strategy encourages centralizing to a single cloud provider, which posed a few challenges as teams previously had the autonomy to choose their own paths and tools. As a result, our platform needed to be architecture in such a way to be agnostic to underlying cloud-specific managed services.

In this talk, we’ll discuss the challenges we faced building our multi-tenant platform in the cloud, including how we designed:
- A secure and isolated environment for our engineering service teams on top of our centralized Kubernetes clusters
- A centralized approach to CI/CD, including standard build and test pipelines
- A managed ingress layer
- Paved paths for new and existing applications

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EniokAz-Plg

Avoiding the pitfalls of autoscaling with Constant Work

The idea of auto-scaling, geo-redundancy, and high-availability for internet applications has been around for a number of years, however, many of the traditional scaling and failover patterns overlook regional outages and cascading failures. The most common practices have applications scale as demand increase or in the case of regional outages.

If you’ve ever wondered if there is an alternative way to manage these risks, this talk is for you!

We’ll look at the concept of constant work as an alternative to scaling on-demand and avoiding cascading failures when systems fail. Particularly, we’ll dig into systems that implement this idea of constant work, how to deal with the trade offs of scale and cost, and where may be good areas for you to invest in this idea.

Lastly, we’ll dig into a concrete example by showing off a system with both methods implemented to test our theory in practice!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR0zpjbTKoI