Garden City Ruby 2014 - Keynote by Chad Fowler

Chad: Yes, hello, thank you.

Audience member: Hello!

Chad: Hello!

I am Chad, as he said.

He said I need no introduction

so I won't introduce myself any further.

I may be the biggest non-Indian fan of India

[Hindi speech]

I'll now switch back, sorry.

If you don't understand Hindi, I said nothing
of value

and it was all wrong.

But I was saying that my Hindi is bad

and it's because now I'm learning German

so I mixed them together, but I know not everyone

speaks Hindi here.

I just had to show off, you know

So, I am currently working on 6WunderKinder,

and I'm working on a product called Wunderlist.

It is a productivity application.

It runs on every client you can think of.

We have native clients, we have a back-end,

we have millions of active users,

and I'm telling you this not so that you'll
go download it -

you can do that too -

but I want to tell you about the challenges
that I have

and the way I'm starting to think about system's
architecture and design.

That's what I'm gonna talk about today

I'm going to show you some things that are
real

and that we're really doing.

I'm going to show you some things that are

just a fantasy that maybe don't make any sense
at all.

But hopefully I'll get you think about

how we think about system architecture

and how we build things that can last for
a long time.

So the first thing that I want to mention:

this is a graph from the Standish Chaos report

and I've taken the years out

and I've taken some of the raw data out

because it doesn't matter.

If you look at these, this graph,

each one of these bars is a year,

and each bar represents successful projects
in green -

software projects.

Challenged projects are in silver or white
in the middle

and then failed ones are in red.

But challenged means significantly over time
or budget

which to me means failed too.

So basically we're terrible,

all of us here, we're terrible.

We call ourselves engineers but it's a disgrace.

We very rarely actually launch things that
work.

Kind of sad,

and I am here to bring you down.

Then once you launch software, anecdotal-y,

and you probably would see this in your own
work lives, too,

anecdotal-y, software gets killed after about
five years -

business software.

So you barely ever get to launch it, because,

or at least successfully, in a way that you're
proud of,

and then in about five years

you end up in that situation where you're
doing a big rewrite

and throwing everything away and replacing
it.

You know there's always that project to get
rid of the junk,

old Java code or whatever that you wrote five
years ago,

replace it with Ruby now,

five years from now you'll be replacing your
old junk Ruby code

that didn't work with something else.

We create this thing, probably all of you
know the term legacy software -

Right, am I right? You know what legacy software
is,

and you probably think of it as a negative
thing.

You think of it as that ugly code that doesn't
work,

that's brittle, that you can't change, that
you're all afraid of.

But there's actually also a positive connotation
of the word legacy:

it's leaving behind something that future
generations can benefit from.

But if we're rarely ever launching successful
projects

and then the ones we do launch tend to die
within five years

none of us are actually creating a legacy
in our work.

We're just creating stuff that gets thrown
away.

Kind of sad.

So we create this stuff that's a legacy software.

It's hard to change, that's why it ends up
getting thrown away

right, that's, if the software worked

and you could keep changing it to meet the
needs of the business

you wouldn't need to do a big rewrite and
throw it away.

We create these huge tightly-coupled systems,

and I don't just mean one application,

but like many applications are all tightly
coupled.

You've got this thing over here talking to
the database of this system over here

so if you change the columns to update the
view of a webpage

you ruin your billing system, that kind of
thing

this is what makes it so hard to change

and the sad thing about this is the way we
work

the way we develop software, this is the default
setting

and, what I mean is, if we were robots churning
out software

and we had a preferences panel

the default preferences would lead to us creating
terrible software that gets thrown away in

five years

that's just how we all work

as human beings when we sit down to write
code

our default instincts lead to us to create
systems that are tightly coupled

and hard to change and ultimately get thrown
away and can't scale

we create, we try doing tests, we try doing
TDD

but we create test suites that take forty-five
minutes to run

every team has had to deal with this I'm sure

if you've written any kind of meaningful application

and it gets to where you have like a project

to speed up the test suite

like you start focusing your company's resources

on making the test suite faster

or making it like only fail ninety percent
of the time

and then you say well if it only fails ninety
percent that's OK

right, and right now it's taking forty-five
minutes

we want to get it to where it only takes ten
minutes to run

so the test suite ends up being a liability
instead of a benefit

because of the way you do it

because you have this architect where everything
is so coupled

you can't change anything without spending
hours working on the stupid test suite

and your terrified to deploy

I know like the last big Java project I was
working on

it would take, once a week we did a deploy

it would take fifteen people all night to
deploy the thing

and usually it was like copying class files
around

and restarting servers

it's much better today but it's still terrifying

you deploy code, you change it in production

you're not sure what might break

cause it's really hard to test these big integrated
things together

and actually upgrading the technology component
is terrifying

so, how many of you have been doing Rails
for more than three years?

do you have, like a Rails 2 app in production,
anyone? Yeah?

that's a lot of people, wow, that's terrifying

and I've been in situations, recently, where
we had Rails 2 apps in production

security patches are coming out, we were applying
our own versions

of those security patches

because we were afraid to upgrade Rails

we would rather hack it than upgrade the thing

because you just don't know what's gonna happen

and then you end up, as you're re-implementing
all this stuff yourself

you end up burning yourself out, wasting your
time

because you're hacking on stupid Rails 2

or some old struts version

when you should be just taking advantage of
the new patches

but you can't because you're afraid to upgrade
the software

because you don't know what's going to happen

because the system is too big and too scary

then, and this is really bad, I think this
is something

Ruby messes up for all of us

I say this as someone who's been using Ruby
for thirteen years now

happily

we create these mountains of abstractions

and the logic ends up being buried inside
them

I mean in Java it was like static, or, you
know, factories

and design pattern soup

in Ruby its modules and mixins and you know

we have all these crazy ways of hiding what's
actually happening from us

but when you go look at the code

it's completely opaque

you have no idea where the stuff actually
gets done

because it's in some magic library somewhere

and we do all that because we're trying to
save ourselves from the complexity of these

big nasty systems

but like if you look at the rest of the world

this is a software specific problem

these cars are old, they're older than any
software that you would ever run

and they're still driving down the street

they're older than software itself, right

but these things still function, they still
work

how? why? why do they work?

bodies! my body should not work

I have abused it

I should not be standing here today

I shouldn't have been able to come from Berlin
here

without dying somehow by being in the air

you know, by the air pressure changes

but our bodies somehow can survive even when

we don't take care of them

and like it's just the system that works,
right

so how do our bodies work?

how do we stay alive

despite this fact

even though we haven't done like some

great design, we don't have any design patterns

like mixed up into our bodies

in biology there is a term called homeostasis

and I literally don't know what this means

other than this definition

so you won't learn about this from me

there's probably at least one biologist in
the room

so you can correct me later

but basically the idea of homeostasis is

that an organism has all these different components

that serve different purposes

that regulate it

so they're all kind of in balance

and they work together to regulate the system

if one component, like a liver, does too much

or does the wrong thing

another component kicks in and fixes it

and so our bodies are this well designed system

for staying alive

because we have almost like autonomous agents

internally that take care of the many things
that can and do go wrong

on a regular basis

so you have, you know, your brain, your liver

your liver, of course, metabolizes toxic substances

your kidney deals with blood, water level,
et cetera

you know all these things work in concert
to make you live

the inability to continue to do that is known
as homeostatic imbalance

so I was saying, homeostasis is balancing

not being able to do that is when you're out
of balance

and that will actually lead to really bad
health problems

or probably death, if you fall into homeostatic
imbalance

so the good news is you're already dying

like we're all dying all the time

this is the beautiful thing about death

there is, there is an estimate that fifty
trillion cells

are in your body, and three million die per
second

it's an estimate because it's actually impossible
to count

but scientists have figured out somehow that
this is probably the right number

so your cells, you've probably heard this
all your life

like physically, after some amount of time,

you aren't the same human being that you were,
physically

you know, I don't know, you some period of
time ago

you're literally not the same organism anymore

but you're the same system

kind of interesting, isn't it

so in a way you can think about software this

you can think about software as a system

if the components could be replaced like these
cells

like, if you focus on making death, constant
death OK

on a small level

then the system can live on a large level

that's what this talk is about

solution, the solution being to mimic living
organisms

and as an aside, I will say many times the
word small or tiny in this talk

because I think I'm learning, as I age

that small is good

its, small projects are good

you know how to estimate them

small commitments are good

because you know you can make them

small methods are good

small classes are good

small applications are good

small teams are good

so I don't know, this is sort of a non sequitur

so if we're going to think about software

as like an organism

what is a cell in that context?

this is sort of the key question that you
have to ask yourself

and I say that a cell is a tiny component

now, tiny and component are both subjective
words

so you can kind of do what you want with that

but it's a good frame of thinking

if you make your software system of tiny components

each one can be like a cell

each one can die and the system is a collection
of those tiny components

and what you want is not for your code to
live forever

you don't care that each line of code lives
forever, right

like if you're trying to develop a legacy
in software

it's not important to you that your system
dot out dot printline statement

lives for ten years

it's important to you that the function of
the system lives for ten years

so like, about exactly ten years ago

we created Ruby gems at the RubyConf 2003
in Austin, Texas

I haven't touched Ruby gems myself in like
four or five years

but people are still using it

they hate it because it's software

everybody hates software right

so if you can create software that people
hate

you've succeeded

but it still exists

I have no idea if any of the code is the same

I would assume not

you know I think, I'm sure that my name is
still in it in a copyright notice

but that's about it

and that's a beautiful thing

people are still using it to install Ruby
libraries

and software

and I don't care if any of my existing, or
my initial code is still in the system

because the system still lives

so, quite a long time ago now I was researching
this kind of question

about Legacy software

and I asked a question on Twitter as I often
do at conferences

when I'm preparing

what are some of the old surviving software
systems you regularly use

and if you look at this, I mean, one thing
is obviously

everyone who answered gave some sort of Unix
related answer

but basically all of these things on this
list

are either systems that are collections of
really well-known split-up components

or they're tiny, tiny programs

so, like, grep is a tiny program, make

it only does one thing

well make is actually also arguably an operating
system

but I won't get into that

emacs is obviously an operating system, right

but it's well designed of these tiny little
pieces

so a lot of the old systems I know about follow
this pattern

this metaphor that I'm proposing

and from my own career

when I was here before in Banglore

I worked for GE and some of the people

we hired even worked on the system there

we had a system called the Bull

and it was a Honeywell Bull mainframe

I doubt any of you have worked on that

but this one I know you didn't work on

because it had a custom operating system

with our own RDVMS

we had created a PCP stack for it

using like custom hardware that we plugged
into a Windows MT computer

with some sort of MT queuing system back in
the day

it was this terrifying thing

when I started working there the system was
already something like twenty-five years old

and I believe even though there have been
many, many projects

to try to kill it, like we had a team called
the Bull exit team

I believe the system is still in production

not as much as it used to be, there are less
and less functions in production

but I believe the system is still in production

the reason for this is that the system was
actually made up of these tiny little components

and like really queer interfaces between them

and we kept the system live because every
time we tried to replace it

with some fancy new gem, web thing or gooey
app

it wasn't as good, and the users hated it

it just didn't work

so we had to use this old, crazy, modified
mainframe

for a long time as a result

so, the question I ask myself is now

how do I, how do I approach a problem like
this

and build a system that can survive for a
long time

I would encourage you

how many of you know of Fred George

this is Fred George

he was at ThoughtWorks for awhile

so he may have, I think he lived in Banglore

for some time with ThoughtWorks, in fact

he is now running a start-up in Silicon Valley

but he has this talk that you can watch online

from the Barcelona Ruby Conference the year
before last

called Microservice Architectures

and he talks in great detail about he,

how he implemented a concept at forward

that's very much like what I'm talking about

tiny components that only do one thing and
can be thrown away

so Microservice Architecture is kind of the
core of what I'm gonna talk about

now I've put together some rules for 6WunderKinder

which I am going to share with you

6WunderKinder is the company I work for

when we're working on Wunderlist

and the rules of the, the goals of these rules

are to reduce coupling, to make it where we
can do fear-free deployments

we reduce the chance of "cruft" in our code

like nasty stuff that you're afraid of

that you leave there, kind of broken window
problems

we make it literally trivial to change code

so you just never have to ask how do I do
that

you just find it easy

and most importantly we give ourselves the
freedom to go fast

because I think no developer ever wants to
be slow

that's one of the worst things

just toiling away and not actually accomplishing
anything

but we go slow because we're constrained by
the system

and we're constrained by, sometimes projects

and other, you know, management related things

but often times its the mess of the system
that we've created

so some of the rules

I think one thing, and maybe, maybe I'm going
to get some push back from this crowd

one rule that is less controversial than it
used to be

is that comments are a design smell

does anyone strongly disagree with that?

no?

does anyone strongly agree with that?

OK, so the rest of you have no idea what I'm
talking about

so a design smell, I want to define this really
quickly

a design smell is something you see in your
code or your system

where it doesn't necessarily mean it's bad

but you look at it and you think

hmm, I should look into this a little bit

and ask myself, why are there so many comments
in this code?

you know, especially the bottom one

inline comments?

definitely bad, definitely a sign that you
should have another method, right

so it's pretty easy to convince people

that comments are a design smell

and I think a lot of people in the industry

are starting to agree

maybe not for like a public library

where you really need to tell someone

here's how you use this class and this is
what it's for

but you shouldn't have to document every method

and every argument because the method name
and the argument name

should speak for themselves, right

so here's one that you probably won't agree
with

tests are a design smell

so this one is probably a little more controversial

especially in an environment where you're
maybe still struggling people

struggling with people to actually get them
to write tests to begin with, right

you know I went through this period in, like,
2000 and 2001

where I was really heavily into evangelizing
TDD

and it was really stressful that you couldn't
get anyone to do it

I think you do have to go through that period

and I'm not saying you shouldn't write any
tests

but that picture I showed you earlier of the
slow, brittle test suite

that's bad, right

that is a bad state to be in

and you're in that state because your tests
suck

that's why you get in that state

your tests suck because you're writing bad
tests

that don't exercise the right things in your
system

and what I've found is whenever I look into
one of these

big slow brittle test suites

the tests themselves are indications

and the sheer proliferation of tests

are indications that the system is bad

and the developers are like desperately

fearfully trying to run the code

in every way they can

because it's the only way they can manage

to even think about the complexity

but if you think about it, if you had a tiny
trivial system

you wouldn't need to have hundreds of test
files

that take ten minutes to run, ever

if you did, you're doing something stupid

you're wasting your time working on tests

and we as software developers obsess about
this kind of thing

because we have to fight so hard to get our
peers to do it in the first place

and to understand it

we obsess to the point where we focus on the
wrong thing

none of us are in the business of writing
tests for customers

like we're not launching our tests on the
web

and hoping people will buy them, right

it doesn't provide value, it's just a side-effect

that we have focused too heavily on

and we've lost sight of what the actual goal
is

so, this one actually requires a visual

I tell the people on my team now

you can write code in any language you want

any framework you want, anything you want
to do

as long as the code is this big

so if you want to write the new service in
Haskell

and it's this big in a normal size font

you can do it

if you want to do it in Closure or Elixir
or Scarla or Ruby

or whatever you want to do

even Python for god's sake

you can do it if it's this big and no bigger

why? because it means I can look at it

and I can understand it

or if I don't I'll just throw it away

because if it's this big it doesn't do very
much, right

so the risk is really low

and I really mean the system is that

there are the, the component is that big

and in my world a component means a service

that's running and probably listening on an
HTTP board

or some sort of rift or RPC protocol

so it's a standalone thing

it's its own application

it's probably in its own git repository

people do poll requests against it

but it's just tiny

so this big

at the top of this, by the way

is some code by Konstantin Haase

who also lives in Berlin, where I live

this is a rewrite of Sinatra

the web framework

and Konstantin is actually the maintainer
of Sinatra

it's not fully compatible, but it's amazingly
close

and it all fits right in that

but the font size is kind of small, so I cheated

another rule, our systems are heterogeneous
by default

so I say you can write in any language you
want

that's not just because I want the developers
to be excited

although I think, most of you, if you worked

in an environment where your boss told you

you can use any programming language or tool
you want

you would be pretty happy about that, right

anyone unhappy about that? I don't think so

unless it's one of the bosses here

that's like don't tell people that

so that's one thing

the other one is, it leads to a good system
design

because think about this

if I write one program in Erlang, one component
in Erlang

one program in Ruby

I have to work really, really hard to make
tight coupling

between those things

like I have to basically use computer science
to do that

I don't even know what I would do

you know it's hard

like I would have to maybe implement Ruby
in Erlang

so that it can run in the same BM or vice
versa

it's just silly, I wouldn't do it

so if my system is heterogeneous by default

my coupling is very low, at least at a certain
level by default

because it's the path of least resistance

is to make the system decoupled

it's easier to make things decoupled than
coupled

if they're all running in different languages

so in the past three months, I'll say

I have written production code in objective
CRuby, Scala, Closure, Node

I don't know, more stuff, Java

all these different languages

real code for work

and yes, they are not tightly coupled

like I haven't installed JRuby so that I could
reach into the internals of my Scala code

because that would be a pain

I don't want to do that

another very important one is

server nodes are disposable

so, back when I was at GE, for example

I remember being really proud when I looked
at the up time of one of my servers

and it was like four hundred days or something

it's like, wow, this is awesome

I have this big server, it had all these apps
on it

we kept it running for four hundred days

the problem with that is I was afraid to ever
touch it

I was really happy it was alive

but I didn't want to do anything to it

I was afraid to update the operating system

in fact you could not upgrade Solaris then
without restarting it

so that meant I had not upgrading the operating
system

I probably shouldn't have been too proud about
it

Nodes that are alive for a long time lead
to fear

and what I want is less fear

so I throw them away

and this means I don't have physical servers
that I throw away

that would be fun but I'm not that rich yet

we use AWS right now, you could do it with
any kind of cloud service

or even internal cloud divider

but every node is disposable

so, we never upgrade software on an existing
server

whenever you want to deploy a new version
of a service

you create new servers

and you deploy that version

and then you replace them in the load balance
or somewhere

that's it

so, you never have to wonder what's on a server

because it was deployed through an automated
process

and there's no fear there

you know exactly what it is

you know exactly how to recreate it

because you have a golden master image

and in our case it's actually an Amazon image

that you can just boot more of

scaling is a problem

you just boot ten more servers

boom, done, no problem

so yeah I tell the team, you know, pick your
technology

everything must be automated, that's another
piece

if you're going to deploy a closure service
for the first time

you have to be responsible for figuring out
how it fits into our deployment system

so that you have immutable deployments and
disposable nodes

if you can do that and you're willing to also
maintain it and teach someone else

about the little piece of code that you wrote,
then cool

you can do it, any level you want

and then once you deploy stuff

like a lot of us like to just SFH in the machines

and then twiddle with things and replace files

and like try like fixing bugs live on production

why no just throw away the actual keys

because you're going to throw away the system
eventually

you don't even need route access to it

you don't need to be able to get to it

except through the port that your service
is listening on

so you can't screw it up

you can't introduce entropy and mess things
up

if you throw away the keys

so this is actually a practice that you can
do

deploy the servers, remove all the credentials

for logging in and the only option you have

is to destroy them when you're done with them

provisioning new services in our world

must also be trivial

so we have actually now thrown away our chef
repository

because chef is obsolete and

we have replaced it with shell scripts

and that sounds like I'm an idiot

I know, but when I say chef is obsolete

I don't really mean that

I like to say that so that people will think

because a lot of you are probably thinking

we should move to chef

that would be great

because what you have is a bunch of servers

that are running for a long time

and you need to be able to continue to keep
them up to date

chef is really great at that

chef is also good at booting a new server

but really it's just overkill for that

yeah

so if you're always throwing stuff away

I don't think you need chef

do something really, really simple

and that's what we've done

so like whenever we deploy a new type of service

I set up ZooKepper recently, which is a complete
change from the other stuff we're deploying

I think it was a five line shell script to
do that

I just added it to a get repo and run a command

I've got a cluster of ZooKeeper servers running

you want to always be deploying your software

this is something I learned from Kent Beck
early on in the agile extreme programming

world

that if something is hard

or you perceive it to be hard or difficult

the best thing you can do

if you have to do that thing all the time

is to just do it constantly

non-stop all the time

so like deploying in our old world

where it would take all night once a week

if we instituted a new policy

in that team that said

any change that goes to master must be deployed
within five minutes

I guarantee you we would have fixed that process,
right

and if you're deploying constantly

all day every day

you're never going to be afraid of deployments

because it's always a small change

so always be deploying

every new deploy means you're throwing away
old servers

and replacing them with new ones

in our world I would say that the average
uptime

of one of our servers is probably something
like

seventeen hours and that's because we don't
tend to work on the weekend very much

you also, when you have these sorts of systems

that are distributed like this

and you're trying to reduce the fear of change

the big thing that you're afraid of is failure

you're afraid that the service is going to
fail

the system is going to go down

one component won't be reachable, that sort
of thing

so you just to have assume that that's going
to happen

you are not going to build a system that never
fails, ever

I hope you don't, because you will have wasted
much of your life

trying to get that to happen

instead, assume that the thing, the components
are going to fail

and build resiliency in

I have a picture here of Joe Armstrong

who is one of the inventors of Erlang

if you have not studied Erlang philosophy
around failure and recovery

you should

and it won't take you long

so I'm just going to leave that as homework
for you

and then, you know, I said, the tests are
a design pattern

I don't mean don't write any tests

but I also want to be further responsible
here

and say you should monitor everything

you want to favor measurement over testing

so I use measurement as a surrogate for testing

or as an enhancement

and the reason I say this is

you can either focus on one of two things

I said assume failure right, so

mean time between failures or mean time to
resolution

those are kind of two metrics in the ops world

that people talk about

for measuring their success and their effectiveness

mean time between failures means

you're trying to increase the time between
failures

of the system, so basically you're trying
to make failures never happen, right

mean time to resolution means

when they happen, I'm gonna focus on bringing
them back

as fast as I possibly can

so a perfect example would be a system fails

and another one is already up and just takes
over its work

mean time to resolution is essentially zero,
right

if you're always assuming that every component
can will fail

then mean time to resolution is going to be
really good

because you're going to bake it into the process

if you do that, you don't care about when
things fail

and back to this idea of favoring measurement
over testing

if you're monitoring everything, everything
with intelligence

then you're actually focusing on mean time
to resolution

and acknowledging that the software is going
to be broken sometimes, right

and when I say monitor everything, I mean
everything

I don't mean, like your disk space and your
memory and stuff there

I'm talking about business metrics

so, at living social we created this thing
called rearview

which is now opensource

which allows you do to aberration detection

and aberration means strange behavior, strange
change in behavior

so rearview can do aberration detection

on data sets, arbitrary data sets

which means, like in the living social world

we had user sign ups

constantly streaming in

it was a very high volume site

if user sign-ups were weird

we would get an alert

why might they be weird?

one thing could be like the user service is
down, right

so then we would get two alerts

user sign ups have gone down

and so has the service

so obviously the problem is the service is
down

let's bring it back up

but it could be something like

a front-end developer or a designer

made a change that was intentional

but it just didn't work and no one liked it

so they didn't sign up to the site anymore

that's more important than just knowing that
the service is down

right, because what you care about

isn't that the service is up or down

if you could crash the entire system and still
be making money

you don't care, right, that's better

throw it away and stop paying for the servers

but if your system is up 100% of the time
and performs excellently

but no one's using it, that's bad

so monitoring business metrics gives you a
lot more than unit test could ever give you

and then in our world

we focused on experiencing

no, you have to come up to front and say ten!

ok, ten minutes left

when I got to 6WunderKinder in Berlin

everyone was terrified to touch the system

because they hadn't created a really well-designed

but traditional monolithic API

so they had layers of abstractions

it was all kind of in one big thing

they had a huge database

and they were really, really scared to do
anything

so there's like one person who would deploy
anything

and everyone else was trying to work on other
projects

and not touch it

but it was like the production system

you know so it wasn't really an option

so the first thing I did in my first week

is I got these graphs going

and this was, yeah, response time

and the first thing I did is I started turning
off servers

and just watching the graphs

and then, as I was turning off the servers

I went to the production database

and I did select, count, star from tasks

and we're a task management app

so we have hundreds of millions of tasks

and the whole thing crashed

and all the people were like AAAAH what's
going on

you know, and I said, it's no problem

I did this on purpose, I'll just make it come
back

which I did

and from that point on

like, really every day I would do something

which basically crash the system for just
a moment

and really, like, we had way too many servers
in production

we were spending tens of thousands more Euros
per month

than we should have on the infrastructure

and I just started taking things away

and I would usually do it

instead of the responsible way,

like one server at a time

I would just remove all of them and start
adding them back

so for a moment everything was down

but after that we go to a point where

everyone on the team was absolutely comfortable

with the worst case scenario

of the system being completely down

so that we could, in a panic free way

just focus on bringing it up when it was bad

so now when you do a deployment

and you have your business metrics being measured

you know the important stuff is happening

and you know what to do when everything is
down

you've experienced the worst thing that can
happen

well the worst thing is like someone breaks
in

and steals all your stuff, steals all your
users' phone numbers

and posts them online like SnapChat or something

but you've experienced all these potentially
horrible things

and realized, eh, it's not so bad, I can deal
with this

I know what do to

it allows you to start making bold moves

and that's what we all want right

we all want to be able to bravely go into
our systems

and do anything we think is right

so that's what I've been focusing on

we also do this thing called Canary in the
Coal Mine deployments

which removes the fear, also

canary in the coalmine refers to a kind of
sad thing

about coal miners in the US

where they would send canaries into the mines

at various levels

and if the canary died they knew there was
a problem

with the air

but in the software world

what this means is you have bunch of servers
running

or a bunch of, I don't know, clients running
a certain version

and you start introducing new version incrementally

and watching the effects

so once you're measuring everything

and monitoring everything

you can also start doing these canary in the
coalmine things

where you say OK I have a new version of this
service

that I'm going to deploy

and I've got thirty servers running for it

but I'm going to change only five of them
now

and see, like, does my error rate increase

or does my performance drop on those servers

or do people actually not successfully complete
the task they're trying to do

on those servers

so, this also allows us the combination of
monitoring everything

and these immutable deployments and everything

gives us the ability to gradually affect change
and not be afraid

so we roll out changes all day every day

because we don't fear that we're just going
to destroy the entire system all at once

so I think I have like five minutes left

uh, these are some things we're not necessarily
doing yet

but they're some ideas that I have

that given some free time I will work on

and, they're probably more exciting

one is I talked about homeostatic regulation

and homeostasis

so I think we all understand the idea of you
know homeostasis

and the fact that systems have different parts
that do different roles

and can protect each other from each other

but, so this diagram is actually just some
random diagram

I copied and pasted off the AWS website

so it's not necessarily all that meaningful

except to show that every architecture

especially server based architectures

has a collection of services that play different
roles

and it almost looks like a person

you've got a brain and a heart and a liver

and all these things, right

what would it mean to actually implement

homeostatic regulation in a web service?

so that you have some controlling system

where the database will actually kill an app
server

that is hurting it, for example

just kill it

I don't know yet, I don't know what that is

but some ideas about this stuff

I don't know if you've heard of these

NetFlix, do you have NetFlix in India yet?

probably not, unless you have a VPN, right

NetFlix has a really great cloud based architecture

they have this thing called Chaos Monkey they've
created

which goes through their system and randomly
destroys Nodes

just crashes servers

and they did this because, when they were,
they were early users of AWS

and when they went out initially with AWS,
servers were crashing

like it was still immature

so they said OK we still want to use this

and we'll build in stuff so that we can deal
with the crashes

but we have to know it's gonna work when it
crashes

so let's make crashing be part of production

so they actually have gotten really sophisticated
now

and they will crash entire regions

cause they're in multiple data centers

so they'll say like, what would happen if
this

data center went down, does the site still
stay up?

and they do this in production all the time

like they're crashing servers right now

it's really neat

another one that is inspirational in this
way

is Pinterest, they use AWS as well

and they have, AWS has this thing called Spot
Instances

and I won't go into too much detail

because I don't have time

but Spot Instances allow you to effectively

bid on servers at a price that you are willing
to pay

so like if a usual server costs $0.20 per
minute

you can say, I'll give $0.15 per minute

and when excess capacity comes open

it's almost like a stock market

if $0.15 is the going price, you'll get a
server

and it starts up and it runs what you want

but here's the cool thing

if the stock market goes and the price goes
higher than you're willing to pay

Amazon will just turn off those servers

they're just dead, you don't have any warning

they're just dead

so Pinterest uses this for their production
servers

which means they save a lot of money

they're paying way under the average Amazon
cost for hosting

but the really cool thing in my opinion

is not the money they save but the fact that

like, what would you have to do to build a
full system

where any node can and will die at any moment

and it's not even under your control

that's really exciting

so a simple thing you can do for homeostasis
though

is you can just adjust

so in our world we have multiple nodes

and all these little services

we can scale each one independently

we're measuring everything

so Amazon has a thing called Auto Scaling

we don't use it, we do our own scaling

and we just do it based on volume and performance

now when you have a bunch of services like
this

like, I don't know, maybe we have fifty different
services now

that each play tiny little roles

it becomes difficult to figure out, like,
where things are

so we've started implementing zookeeper for
service resolution

which means a service can come online and
say

I'm the reminder service version 2.3

and then tell a central guardian

and the zookeeper can then route traffic to
it

probably too detailed for now

I'm gonna skip over some stuff real quick

but I want to talk about this one

if, did the Nordic Ruby, no, Nordic Ruby talks
never go online

so you can never see this talk

sorry

at Nordic Ruby Reginald Braithwaite did a
really cool talk

on like challenges of the Ruby language

and he made this statement

Ruby has beautiful but static coupling

which was really strange

but basically he was making the same point
that

I was talking about earlier

that, like Ruby creates a bunch of ways that
you can couple

your system together

that kind of screw you in the end

but they're really beautiful to use

but, like, Ruby can really lead to some deep
crazy coupling

and so he presented this idea of bind by contract

and bind by contract, in a Ruby sense

would be, like, I have a class that has a
method

that takes these parameters under these conditions

and I can kind of put it into my VM

and whenever someone needs to have a functionality
like that

it will be automatically bound together

by the fact that it can do that thing

and instead of how we tend to use Ruby and
Java and other languages

I have a class with a method name I'm going
to call it

right, that's coupling

but he proposed this idea of this decoupled
system

where you just say I need a functionality
like this

that works under the conditions that I have
present

so this lead me to this idea

and this may be like way too weird, I don't
know

what if in your web application your routes
file

for your services read like a functional pattern
matching syntax

so like if you've ever used Erlang or Haskell
or Scala

any of these things that have functional pattern
matching

what if you could then route to different
services

across a bunch of different services

based on contract

now I have zero time left

but I'm just gonna keep talking, cause I'm
mean

oh wait I'm not allowed to be mean

because of the code of contact

so I'll wrap up

so this is an idea that I've started working
on as well

where I would actually write an Erlang service

with this sort of functional pattern matching

but have it be routing in really fast real
time

through back end services that support it

one more thing I just want to show you real
quick

that I am working on and I want to show you

because I want you to help me

has anyone used JSON schema?

OK, you people are my friends for the rest
of the conference

in a system where you have all these things
talking to each other

you do need a way to validate the inputs and
outputs

but I don't want to generate code that parses
and creates JSON

I don't want to do something in real time
that intercepts my

kind of traffic, so there's this thing called
JSON schema

that allows you to, in a completely decoupled
way

specify JSON documents and how they should
interact

and I am working on a new thing that's called
Klagen

which is the German word for complain

it's written in Scala, so if anyone wants
to pair up on some Scala stuff

what it will be is a high performance asynchronous
JSON schema validation middleware

so if that's interesting to anyone, even if
you don't know Scala or JSON schema

please let me know

and I believe I'm out of time so I'm just
gonna end there

am I right? I'm right, yes

so thank you very much, and let's talk during
the conference