Lessons Learned – Learning from those who blazed the trail!

Another cool thing I like about attending conferences is learning from how other companies and people overcame problems, how they run their systems, and figure out problems that I may run into in the future. Secretly I also want to validate how I have done things and make sure I did not miss something. 😀 Percona Live has a huge group of interesting speakers and users, customers, and companies are sharing tons of interesting war stories, how-to’s, and explaining some things they are very proud of! So what is the HOSS looking forward to hearing about?

SCALE!

Who is going to be sharing their tales of scale? 

Edmodo’s Pandemic Natarajan Chidhambharam & Miklos Szel will be sharing “A Tale of 25x Growth in Three Weeks”. Edmodo does online educational services/software, so when Covid hit their entire platform’s traffic skyrocketed within days. This is a tale of massive growth and dealing with growth you could never imagine.

Another talk to gain insight on that unexpected growth comes from Art van Scheppingen at MessageBird in his talk entitled:  “How to Cope With (Unexpected) Millupling of Your Workload?”

While the pandemic caused load for many, high load often occurs with regular frequency for many companies.  Javi Santana from TinyBird is going to share with us his story of growth and scale in the talk: “How We Processed 12 Trillion Rows During Black Friday”.

But one time events or even recurring events are nothing compared to a constant flow of transactions.  To learn how to handle that you may want to see how a company like Adobe handles this workload.  Adobe’s Yeshwanth Vijayakumar will be giving us the details in his talk “How Adobe Does Millions of Records Per Second Using Apache Spark”

The team over at Venmo/Payal (Kushal Shah, Neeraj Wadhwani, Van Pham, & Tianshi Wang) will also be sharing the secrets of how they scale in their talk: “Scaling Venmo’s Payments”. While not all of us run at this level of scale, understanding the issues they faced and how they resolved them can help many as they build what’s next.

Migrations! There and Back Again

Who doesn’t love a good story about moving to a new town, state, or in the case of companies new cloud provider!   If you are looking for information and stories from others’ cloud migration adventures look no further than the following:

BlaBlaCar’s Maxime Fouilleul is going to be delivering “Organize the Migration of a Hundred Database Clusters to the Cloud”.  Migrating a few databases is challenging, but hundreds or thousands of them is daunting.  

Sometimes the last part of a migration is the most challenging.  Box’s Jordan Moldow is going to share with us the challenges Box faced in finishing that large migration in his talk: The Last Mile: Delivering the Last 10% of a Four-Year Migration

Groupon recently moved their systems all to AWS.  Groupon’s Mani Subramanian will be sharing the ins and outs of this Journey in his talk  “MySQL & PostgreSQL Migration to AWS at Groupon”

Database Operations Best Practices From the Experts

Finding out better ways to do our day-to-day jobs helps us find more time and get more efficient.  Good thing so many great companies are willing to share what has found works for them.

Upgrades Whether in the cloud or not are sometimes challenging. Ashwin Nellore & Kushal Shah are going to share “Venmo’s Aurora Upgrades With Open Source Tools” detailing how they approach and execute upgrades in an AWS environment.

Stephen Borg & Matthew Formosa (GiG) are going to talk about choosing the best tool or in this case database for the job in their talk  “Fun and Games: Why We Picked ClickHouse To Drive Gaming Analytics at GiG “.  Gaming analytics ( any analytics really ) remains a hot topic.  Learning why Clickhouse fits their needs should be interesting.  

When your website has millions of users and 24×7 requirements you have to set things up to scale and survive multiple outages.  Companies like Linkedin have spent lots of money and many hours solving many of these scale and availability challenges.  That is why listening in on Karthik Appigatla talking about “Multi-colo Async Replication at LinkedIn” is going to be very informative. Later on, Karthik is joined by Apoorv Purohit to discuss scaling Linkedin with Vitess. 

When you have large datasets and lots of individual databases, even something as simple as copying databases from one environment to the next can be a challenge. Nicolai Plum from Booking.com has some practical advice and tips in his talk:  The Many Ways to Copy Your Database.

Finally, keeping track of what’s happening in any server when you have hundreds more is a pain. That’s why I am excited to hear about how Rappi’s Daniel Guzman Burgos & Rodrigo Cadaval did this in their environment.  Their talk “Monitoring Hundreds of RDS PostgreSQL Instances with PMM: The Rappi Case” aims to provide us with practical ways to monitor those oversized database environments.

There is a lot to learn from those in the industry who are solving real problems at scale! These are just a few of the sessions and talks I am looking forward to learning from.

Not registered yet? There’s still time! Don’t miss it!