Randy Shoup

Consulting CTO

@randyshoup

Randy has spent more than 30 years building distributed systems and high performing teams, and has worked as a senior technology leader at eBay, Google, and Stitch Fix. He coaches CTOs, advises companies, and generally makes a nuisance of himself wherever possible. He was most recently VP Engineering and Chief Architect at eBay, and is particularly interested in the nexus between culture, technology, and organization.

Talk Session

Large-Scale Architecture: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simplicity

Building distributed systems that work is hard. And scaling those systems by multiple orders of magnitude is even harder. Using examples from internet-scale consumer properties like Google, Amazon, and eBay, this talk deep-dives into the counterintuitive idea that the key to success in large-scale architecture is simplicity.

We first discuss simple components like modular services, orthogonal domain logic, and service layering. Next we discuss simple interactions between components, leveraging event-driven models, immutable logs, and asynchronous dataflow. Then we explore techniques that simplify making changes to the system, including incremental changes, continuous testing, canary deployments, and feature flags.

In the final part of the talk, we show how all these ideas work together with specific architectural examples from Amazon, Netflix, and Walmart.

You will take away actionable insights you can immediately put into practice in your own systems.