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

Aruna Sankaranarayanan

@aruna28

Spotswap: running production APIs on spot instances

Submitted Apr 10, 2017

The Mapbox maps API runs on AWS’s cloud infrastructure, responding to a peak of ~1.5M requests/minute on the edge, and spread over 6 origin regions globally.

Since 2015, we’ve cut the cost of running our maps services on AWS EC2 while continuing to increase the scale of our web traffic. This talk will delineate our cost optimisation journey by talking about why we decided to run production architecture on spot instances and the evolution of our architecture as a result.

Outline

The AWS EC2 market allows users to bid for unused EC2 capacity, which is sold at a lower price than on-demand capacity. On the spot market, you could pay as little as 10% of list price for an EC2. The market price is constantly fluctuating, determined based on demand for certain instance types, among other factors. The one caveat to using spot instances is that if the market price rises above your bid price, you only have 2 minutes’ notice before the EC2 shuts down.

In order to run production instances on the spot market, we set up two AutoScaling groups, one running spot instances and another running the fallback on-demand instances. When instances in the spot group showed signs of failing healthchecks, and scaledown the on-demand group again when the spot group had stabilised. While the spot autoscaling group provided for the cost efficiency, the backup on-demand group made our services robust and scalable.

spot

When we migrated our stacks to ECS (AWS’s hosted Docker solution) last summer, we replaced the spot on demand group with a spot fleet. Now we are protected not only by the cost savings on the spot market, but also the additional diversity of a spotfleet where we are able to choose multiple EC2 instance types in a spotfleet to replace the spot autoscaling group in our earlier architecture.

Detailed breakup

  • Reliable production services on spot instances.
  • The need for spotswap
  • Spotswap 0.0.1
    • Bottlenecks
    • Ensuring stability of the architecture
    • Spotswap 0.0.2
  • Open sourcing spotswap

Speaker bio

I am a developer on the Platform team at Mapbox. Over the last year, I have worked on scaling our internal infrastructure, and helped in migrating our services to the AWS ECS. This talk talks about an elegant architectural concept that we devised at Mapbox to run our services in a cost-efficient manner. In other lives, I have written 2D games using the Cocos2D engine, submitted small activities to the GCompris project and contributed to the GNOME Foundation. I also enjoy collecting recordings of Indian classical music that are in the public domain.

Slides

https://www.dropbox.com/s/y8wv5oo8kggxj40/may-2017-rootconf-PDF.pdf?dl=0

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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