Architecting for High Availability in the Cloud with Cellular Architecture

Interview:

What's the focus of your work these days?

I’ve recently transitioned from working on the backend, architecture, and infrastructure components of Momento’s serverless cache to lead our developer ecosystem. That means that my current day job is providing clean, simple libraries that allow Momento users to start caching with as little friction as humanly possible, in whatever environment they are already building things in. Nowadays, instead of building out our infrastructure, I’m focused on helping users remove things from theirs :)

What's the motivation for your talk at QCon San Francisco 2023?

Having witnessed several different strategies for managing and scaling server-side infrastructure at my previous jobs, I have seen first-hand what a huge difference it makes for a software company (and more importantly, for their customers) to invest a little upfront to build a solid foundation for a cellular architecture. Over time, the relatively small upfront investment pays off in so many ways: protecting customers from outages, allowing the business to react more quickly to changing demands, dramatically reducing operational overhead and improving developer productivity; the list goes on. I’m excited to share some of these learnings in hopes that the audience can adapt them to their own infrastructure.

How would you describe your main persona and target audience for this session?

This talk is intended for engineering folks who are building and operating multi-regional cloud applications and services. We’ll primarily focus on AWS solutions to cellular architecture problems, so some familiarity with AWS account and permissions management will be useful, but the principles can be applied to any major cloud environment.

Is there anything specific that you'd like people to walk away with after watching your session?

Attendees will hear about some of the very tangible benefits that can be achieved by building automation for deploying and managing cellular infrastructure for your service or application. We’ll also give some concrete examples of specific technologies such as AWS SSO, AWS Organizations, and AWS CodePipelines that can be used to realize a scalable cellular solution. I hope to convince you that a small engineering investment upfront will pay for itself many, many times over by improving your customer experience and increasing your engineering velocity.