SREcon16 Europe

From stores with ads in the Super Bowl to selling Kanye’s latest album, Shopify has built a name for itself handling some of the world’s largest flash sales. These high profile events generate write-heavy traffic that can be four times our platform’s baseline throughput and don’t lend themselves to off-the-shelf solutions.

This talk is the story of how we engineered our platform to survive large bursts of traffic. Since it’s not financially sound for Shopify to have the required capacity always running, we built queueing and page caching layers into our Nginx load balancers with Lua. To guarantee these solutions worked, we tested them with a purpose-built load testing service.

Although flash sales are unique to commerce platforms, the lessons we learn from them are applicable to any services that experience bursts of traffic.

Ever have a bad manager? Or have a project go off the rails but feel powerless to stop the trainwreck? I'll talk about why knowing a little bit about management can help you as an individual contributor or tech lead, and talk about a few ways that you can help yourself and your SRE team without ever formally managing yourself.

Have you ever bought machines? What if you need to even build datacenters? How can you predict how many you are going to need in two years from now? How can you make efficient use of all the resources you suddenly got? What if you are missing some resources? Can we automate all these stuff and integrate with our continuous delivery?

These are just a few questions anyone planning a large computer fleet always make. This talk will cover some of the approaches and tooling that can be used to effectively plan for the demand of services and how to cover it on the most efficient manner.

Cover the experience gained in developing load-shedding solutions and the impact in service management, at large scale.