KEYNOTE: Managing Scale and Complexity

The Netflix technical story is widely recognized at the forefront of Cloud, NoSQL, software and media technology deployment, and serves as an extraordinary example of successful web-scale optimization. But behind the pioneering technical accomplishments is a managerial and design journey that is just as interesting.

In this Keynote presentation, we have asked Adrian Cockcroft, the architect behind Netflix's technology leadership, to reflect on his successes (and possibly the untold failures) in constantly pushing the boundaries of scale and complexity. What lessons have been learned about building for performance? What design principles are used to guide each new iteration of software? What management practices help to keep projects on time and budget? How are risk/reward trade-offs made?

As other organizations graduate in scale and complexity, they have much to learn from the lessons and principles that Netflix has acquired on its journey.

Adrian Cockcroft is the director of architecture for the Cloud Systems team at Netflix. He is leading the open source NetflixOSS program and the Netflix Cloud Prize (see http://netflix.github.com). He has presented at many conferences, including the Cassandra Summit, NoSQL Now, QCon/GOTO, Cloud Connect, Velocity, Gluecon and Structure. Adrian is also well known as the author of several books while a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems: Sun Performance and Tuning; Resource Management; and Capacity Planning for Web Services. From 2004-2007 he was a founding member of eBay Research Labs.