Rootconf 2017

On service reliability

##Submit proposals for flash talks
Rootconf is on 11-12 May. If you have:

  1. Tips and tricks for simplifying infrastructure management and maintenance;
  2. Experiences with new tools to share;
  3. Cool demos;

then propose a flash talk here, or on the spot, at the venue.

The flash talk session is on 11 May, from 17:20-18:20. We have room for about 12 flash talks. Each presentation should be no more than 5 minutes.

A final note of caution when presenting at flash talks: we have a code of conduct at the conference. You must refrain from making remarks that may be perceived as sexist or derogatory. If you want to double check your presentation, contact Sandhya Ramesh, Karthik B. or Zainab Bawa at the venue.

##Theme
The theme for the 2017 edition is service reliability. The conference will feature talks on state of the art deployment strategies and appropriate monitoring technologies at different scales. Rootconf this year will broadly cover topics like toil, on-call, outage handling, and post-mortem analysis. We are inviting presentation proposals from academics and practitioners on these topics.

Rootconf aims to appeal to the widest possible range of DevOps practitioners: from embryonic startups to the largest established enterprises. We are keen to schedule presentations that appeal both to attendees’ current needs as well as their future aspirations.

##About the Conference
Rootconf is India’s principal conference where systems and operations engineers share real world knowledge about building reliable systems. We are now accepting submissions for our next edition which will take place in Bangalore on 11-12 May 2017.

Topics for Round 2 of the CfP were:

  1. Capacity planning.
  2. Deploying microservices, and issues concerning monitoring and reliability of microservices.
  3. Deployment and orchestration of container based infrastructures.
  4. Open tracing.

Topics for Round 1 of the CfP were:

  1. Monitoring strategies
  2. Deployment strategies
  3. Capacity planning
  4. Automation beyond deployment and monitoring
  5. Eliminating toil
  6. On-call outage handling
  7. Postmortem / root cause analysis
  8. Incident response

##Format
Rootconf is a three track conference:

We are inviting proposals for:

  • Full-length 40-minute talks – which cover conceptual topics and include case studies.
  • Crisp 15-minute how-to talks or introduction to a new technology.
  • Sponsored sessions, of 15 minutes and 40 minutes duration (limited slots available; subject to editorial scrutiny and approval).
    Hands-on workshop sessions of 3 and 6 hour duration where participants follow the instructors on their laptops.

##Selection Process
Proposals will be filtered and shortlisted by an Editorial Panel. Please make sure to add links to videos / slide decks when submitting proposals. This will help us understand your speaking experience and delivery style. Blurbs or blog posts covering the relevance of a particular problem statement and how it is tackled will help the Editorial Panel better judge your proposals. We might contact you to ask if you’d like to repost your content on the official conference blog.

We expect you to submit an outline of your proposed talk, either in the form of a mind map or a text document or draft slides within two weeks of submitting your proposal.

Selection Process Flowchart

You can check back on this page for the status of your proposal. We will notify you if we either move your proposal to the next round or if we reject it. Selected speakers must participate in one or two rounds of rehearsals before the conference. This is mandatory and helps you to prepare well for the conference.

A speaker is NOT confirmed a slot unless we explicitly mention so in an email or over any other medium of communication.

There is only one speaker per session. Entry is free for selected speakers.

##Travel Grants
As our budget is limited, we prefer speakers from locations closer home, but will do our best to cover for anyone exceptional. HasGeek provides these limited grants where applicable:

  • Two grants covering travel and accommodation for international speakers.
  • Three grants covering travel and accommodation for domestic speakers.

Grants will be made available to speakers delivering full sessions (40 minutes or longer).
*Speaker travel grants will be given in the order of preference to students, women, persons of non-binary genders, and speakers from Asia and Africa.

##Commitment to Open Source
HasGeek believes in open source as the binding force of our community. If you are describing a codebase for developers to work with, we’d like for it to be available under a permissive open source licence. If your software is commercially licensed or available under a combination of commercial and restrictive open source licences (such as the various forms of the GPL), please consider picking up a sponsorship. We recognise that there are valid reasons for commercial licensing, but ask that you support us in return for giving you an audience. Your session will be marked on the schedule as a “sponsored session”.

##Important Dates:

  • Deadline for submitting proposals: 10 April, 2017
  • Final conference schedule: 15 April 2017
  • Conference dates: 11-12 May, 2017

##Contact
For more information about speaking proposals, tickets and sponsorships, contact info@hasgeek.com or call +91-7676332020.

Hosted by

Rootconf is a community-funded platform for activities and discussions on the following topics: Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Infrastructure costs, including Cloud Costs - and optimization. Security - including Cloud Security. more

Ramanan Balakrishnan

@ramananbalakrishnan

Adventures in Postgres management

Submitted Jan 14, 2017

The talk will cover deployment, maintenance and monitoring strategies for large-scale Postgres instances. Starting with a story about unexpected performance issues, the journey will continue down the rabbit hole of database management. Concurrency control solutions in Postgres, their benefits, drawbacks and consequences will be discussed - via a post-mortem analysis of an (almost-catastrophic) incident. Structured as a series of investigation-action-learning cycles - the aim is to convey the inquisitive mindset required of DevOps engineers to maintain high-reliability systems.

Outline

Introduction and setup [~ 5 mins]

The aim of this section is to provide a gentle introduction to the system being examined. The use-case, requirements and setup of the tools will be discussed to benefit those not familiar with the intricacies of the domain.

topics covered:

  • basic overview of Postgres/SQL database management
  • solutions for concurrency control via transaction IDs
  • caveats to these solutions and its consequences

Deep dive into the story [~ 20 mins]

This section will form the crux of the talk. Beginning with investigations into reports of degraded performance, the story leads towards specific limitations of Postgres’s MVCC implementation.

Tools used in investigating the incident and various attempted solutions will be discussed. The focus will be on diagnosing/fixing systems without compromising on underlying performance and uptime requirements.

topics covered:

  • overview of use-case, system setup and configuration specifics
  • initial monitoring and tracking system performance reports
  • tools used to investigate the degradation
  • first attempt at a fix, its failure to correct, and subsequent learning
  • second attempt to brute-force a solution, and the resulting (failed) inconsistent state
  • final attempt at a simpler solution, and learning

Lessons, Upgrades and Conclusion [~ 10 mins]

The last section will cover lessons learned - including checks and systems that could have avoided the problem. The various knobs available to DevOps engineers to manage the performance of their systems will be explored. Combining personal experiences with industry best practices, the aim is to deliver concrete steps to simplify database management. Also, in the months since the incident, patches in newer Postgres releases which fix the problem will be listed.

topics covered:

  • knobs to turns and levers to pull when tuning systems
  • best practices to simplify Postgres management roles
  • updates and relevant patches available via newer releases

Requirements

Even though the session is aimed at the novice DevOps engineer, a general understanding of relational databases and their performance requirements/constraints would help.

Speaker bio

I am a member of the data science team at Semantics3 - building data-powered software for ecommerce-focused companies. Over the years, I have had the chance to dabble in various fields covering data processing, pipeline setup, database management and data science. When I am not picking locks, or scuba diving, I usually blog about my technical adventures at our team’s engineering blog.

Slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Uf2t4f_MmDqth5X21e9CsXweYe63_5Y7fbg4Rh2Gefk/pub

Comments

{{ gettext('Login to leave a comment') }}

{{ gettext('Post a comment…') }}
{{ gettext('New comment') }}
{{ formTitle }}

{{ errorMsg }}

{{ gettext('No comments posted yet') }}

Hosted by

Rootconf is a community-funded platform for activities and discussions on the following topics: Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Infrastructure costs, including Cloud Costs - and optimization. Security - including Cloud Security. more