In the past three days I attended the ProgNET London 2019 conference.
Here my key notes from the various sessions and workshops I've attended:
Scaling Systems: Architectures that grow
How long the user wait until he consider your app down? That's what matter. Be pragmatic in your efforts to improve availability. If your availability requirements are met just stop!
Do the minimal amount of work on the critical path. Use speculative execution and/or queue work that can be complated later.
Optimize for read by implementing simple caching algorithms (use 80/20 rule). Start caching on the client before introducing caching server-side.
Distribute requests across multiple systems (scale out).
Always monitor your production system to verify your changes are impacting availability as you expect
Original paper: Communicating Sequential Process
Provides a way to implement efficient publish/subscribe scenarios between tasks
Can dispatch 20+ million messages in under a second without blocking threads.
Quantum Computing 101
Superposition: each bit can be 0 or 1 at the same time until observed
Entanglement: two particles no matter how far change their state at the same time (Bell Prize goes to scientists who proved 'spooky' quantum entanglement is real)
Shor's algorithm could be used to break public-key cryptography schemes, such as the widely-used RSA scheme. A quantum machine able to run it does not yet exist.
Q# is Microsoft language to write quantum programs
Surviving Microservices
Microservices implementation has to be good, it won't be fast and will not be cheap
Business must support a microservices transition as it can cost million of dollars. All key players must analyze use cases, domain, sub-domains and resources to identify the microservices boundaries.
Build plenty of dashboards around your logs.
"If you don't write your logs, you won't have them"
Microservice consumers must provide test cases
Implement a disaster recovery protocol and test it
Start with 1 or 2 services and add more over time if needed
The Pipeline Driven organization
The enable real continuous integration and delivery you need to have the pipeline to make decisions (no more human approval gates)
The biggest barrier in adopting full automation are people needing to change their behaviors
Every time something happen that reduce the confidence in the pipeline, you change/update it
Distributed Cloud Native System
Istio is one of the most popular open source service mesh that works on top of Kubernetes
Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes
Kubernetes concepts: namespace, node, pod, labels, selectors, external volume, replica set, deployment
Teams are in three stages: survival mode, learning mode, self-organizing mode
Leaders know what to do when they don't know what to do
Teams are in learning mode if everyone is a little bit annoyed, a bit out of their comfort zone
Performance
3 Key Elements: execution time, throughput, memory allocations
Performance expectations should be discussed before implementing features
Always measure and optimise
Find the right balance between performance and redability
Benchmark.NET is the framework of choise for performance benchmarking in .NET
Span<T> offer an unified view over a continuous block of memory (even unmanged)
Span<T> is a ref struct so can only be used on the stack.
Use Memory<T> if you need a span allocated on the heap
String.Create can improve performance when initializing large strings
ArrayPool can improve performance by reausing arrays in your application
Pipelines make it easier to do high performance IO in .NET and use ArrayPool under the covers
stackalloc in C# allows you to allocate memory on the stack
The new System.Text.Json namespace provide new high performance ways to work with Json. At the high level you can use JsonSerializer/Deserializer. Mid level you can use JsonDocument. Low level you can use UtfJsonReader/Writer.
How to sell performance optimization to your business: find a quick win, prototype an optimization, use the scientific approach, convert results into memory and determine the cost to benefit ratio.
Event-Driven Systems
Smart endpoints and dumb pipes
A Microservice is effectively a way to encapsulate a system behind an API. It's a logical boundary. It's not an app running in a container. It might be made of multiple services inside.
If you can't deploy your microservice indipendently you are not getting the benefit of microservices
The "Join" Problem: Each API call from a microservice to an another decrease the overall availability of a microservice (if a microservice make 4 API calls to 99.95% available microservices, it's availability becomes 99.8%). The service mesh and event driven architectures help to solve this problem. It can enable the overal system to continue working in a degradated state even if one microservice goes down.
Event Carried State Transfer solve the Join problem by using local caches.
Cache Outside Data not Inside Data - Never export microservice internal data
SAGA Pattern to maintain data consistency across services
Consistency vs Availability is the trade-off
malloc() in Linux always succeed. Linux kills a process randmonly when there is no memory.
If you use the cloud, make sure you have a strong support contract. You will need it!
If you want to attend the conference next year, you find more info on ProgNET London 2020.