The ecommerce company Gilt.com (founded 2007) started out as a monolithic Rails application built and maintained by just a handful of engineers. Gilt has since become a global e-commerce destination built upon a sophisticated Scala/Java micro-services architecture strong enough to handle the company’s intense traffic spikes--generated by millions of the company’s members simultaneously visiting the site at noon each day. The concept of micro-services--smaller, lighter, faster components delivered swiftly to production--has resolved many of the growing pains we experienced evolving from “just a handful of engineers” into an engineering team of +100. However, microservices bring their own set of tradeoffs.
In this talk I'll discuss the evolution of Gilt's micro-service architecture, and the challenges we now face today. How do you move a large Micro-Service deployment to the cloud? How does micro-services affect ownership and software quality? Why do API’s really matter? How can the micro-service approach applied to front-end web applications? And, why has our adoption of micro-services lead us to the conclusion that all our teams should prefer to deploy and test software in production?
About the speaker:
Adrian Trenaman is the VP Engineering at Gilt. Ade is an experienced, outspoken software engineer, communicator and leader with more than 20 years of experience working with technology teams throughout Europe, US and Asia in diverse industries such as financial services, telecom, retail, and manufacturing. He specializes in high-performance middleware, messaging and application development, and is pragmatic, hard-working, collaborative and results-oriented. In the past, he has held the positions of CTO of Gilt Japan, Tech Lead at Gilt Groupe Ireland, Distinguished Consultant at FuseSource, Progress Software and IONA Technologies, and Lecturer at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth. He became a committer for the Apache Software Foundation in 2010, has acted as an expert reviewer to the European Commission, and has spoken at numerous Tech events.
Ade holds a Ph.D, Computer Science from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, a Diploma in Business Development from the Irish Management Institute, and a BA (Mod. Hons) Computer Science from Trinity College, Dublin.