Bringing Chaos to the Enterprise

Chaos Engineering can offer a unique approach to testing and demonstrating the resilience of our infrastructure, applications and systems.
However, mentioning the word chaos when talking to your Enterprise's QA team may not be well received, so in this talk, I'll talk about the approach I used when working alongside a large enterprise client, and how we were able to explore, develop and deliver a solution using Amazon's Fault Injection Service.

Extending the Shared Responsibility Model for resilience

This talk looks at the AWS Shared Responsibility Model and how until now it has been used to describe the approach for security in the Cloud.

We'll then look at how it should be extended to cover resilience - how AWS provide many approaches to make our systems and applications more fault-tolerant, and what we as architects and developers need to consider.

I've been building systems for nearly 40 years, 10 of which have been in the cloud.

I've been speaking recently about Chaos Engineering and how we can use it to demonstrate resilience of our applications. But I'd like to talk about a more fundamental shift in how we think about resilience in the Cloud by extending the Shared Responsibility Model.

Last year was my first year of professional speaking, where I presented at Serverless Days Milan, a number of AWS Community Days and User Groups, along with the SREDays conference in London. This year I've already spoken at the AWS Summits in London and Hamburg, along with a number of AWS User Groups.

Hedging Your Bets: Why the AWS European Sovereign Cloud is a UK Risk Strategy

The new AWS European Sovereign Cloud (ESC) offers a paradigm shift in how we think about data ownership and operational control. For UK organizations, the knee-jerk reaction might be to assume this service is "not for us" because we are outside the EU. That assumption is a strategic risk.

In this talk, we’ll consider the implications of current geopolitical instability and regulatory uncertainty, and how the ESC can serve as a vital "insurance policy" for UK firms. We’ll dive into the unique "partition" model—where even the metadata stays within the EU—and discuss how this mitigates risks that standard regions cannot. Finally, we will look at the practical side: the limitations of the current offering and the architectural trade-offs you need to know before moving your first workload.

While this features an EU service, this talk is specifically tailored for the UK market. Given the current geo-political situation and legal US/EU/UK regulations, my session will suggest that the Sovereign Cloud is a technical necessity for British firms that the standard UK AWS regions cannot fully address.

Mystery of the disappearing s3 keys

Imagine a system designed to process millions of events per day, but as use grows, data mysteriously seems to disappear, only to re-appear later. We’ll talk about the what, why and how we investigated the symptoms, overturned some assumptions and finally delivered a resilient, serverless solution

The talk explains an issue we encountered with a serverless architecture running in AWS to process logs, how we investigated the issue, before talking about how we improved the product to deal with failures more efficiently.

The issue was enventually found to be caused by ‘Eventual Consistency’, something that is a potential issue in many distributed system, but we’ve found people aren’t always aware of. We’ll also talk about why reading documentation in depth is important, not just skim-reading as at first glance, eventual consistency didn't seem to be a problem that would apply to us.

Resilience Engineering: How I learned to stop worrying and love chaos (engineering)!

In this talk, we’ll briefly explore the history of traditional testing approaches such as manual, unit, functional and integration tests before introducing the missing piece in the testing puzzle, chaos engineering where we move beyond focusing on our code, to look at the infrastructure running our systems.

We’ll talk about the history of chaos engineering, look at how Netflix pioneered this engineering approach, before looking at Amazon’s Fault Injection Service (FIS) and how it can be used to test different components. Finally we’ll look at the recent announcement of functionality allowing us to test Lambda functions, before moving onto a live demonstration of how we can carry out these tests with Lambda and how FIS works.

I’ve been working with Serverless systems for nearly 10 years, and have been involved in projects that have had a traditional bias to testing, before looking at FIS over the last year, initially with EC2 before moving onto testing serverless components, both for internal projects and for my employers clients.

I recently ran a workshop on FIS, delivered in person and online so have proven experience in this area.

Last year was my first year of professional speaking, where I presented at Serverless Days Milan, a number of AWS Community Days and User Groups, along with the SREDays conference in London.