Scaling Data - Monoliths, Migrations, and Microservices with Randy Shoup

Data is the lifeblood of a modern company. Google, eBay, and Stitch Fix all derive much of their value from knowing their customers deeply, and have all evolved software architectures that use that data to deliver personalized experiences rapidly, reliably, and safely. In all cases this has involved breaking up a monolithic data store into what we now call microservices.

This talk will discuss the challenges and opportunities of both monolithic and microservice approaches. It will discuss how and why companies decide to make this transition. Most importantly, it will outline successful patterns for managing the breakup of a monolith, as well as architectural techniques to retain some of the things we love about our monolith -- shared data, joins, and transactions -- even in a microservices world.

Randy Shoup is a 25-year veteran of Silicon Valley, and has worked as a senior technology leader and executive at companies ranging from small startups to mid-sized places to eBay and Google. Randy is currently VP Engineering at Stitch Fix in San Francisco.

Earlier, Randy was Chief Engineer at eBay for 6 1/2 years, where he was responsible for multiple generations of eBay’s realtime search infrastructure. He was CTO and co-founder of a startup, and learned just how difficult and different it is to build a company from scratch. He was Director of Engineering at Google for Google App Engine, building and operating the world’s largest platform-as-a-service. He also spent a year and a half applying eBay and Google lessons consulting with startups and large enterprises on how to improve their organizations and technology.