Brings observability to the microservice architecture on Kubernetes

Microservices and containers have changed application design and deployment patterns. They’ve also brought with them some new challenges, such as service discovery, routing, failure handling, distributed tracing, circuit breaker, retry logic and visibility (monitoring) to microservices.

Kubernetes can handle multiple container-based workloads, including microservices, but when it comes to more sophisticated features like traffic management, failure handling, and resiliency, it leaves a lot to be desired. Most importantly, we want to do all this without changing the application code.

Service mesh architecture was created to handle these requirements. Istio is a service mesh created through a collaboration between IBM, Google and Lyft.

In this talk we will talk about the need of a service mesh, and what Istio brings to the table. We will also give a short demonstration of Istio in Kubernetes.

The most radical period of change in industrial history is nearly upon us. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, where billions of people have access to vast knowledge and unlimited processing power, brings with it great complexity. Traditional engineering frameworks will no longer be enough to navigate the messiness that lies ahead. Technology will lie at the heart of every industry, and organizations will have to undergo a paradigm shift to harness it and develop innovative business models. This calls for the role of orchestrators who can navigate organizations through all the messiness.

This session will be delivered by Saptorsi Hore -COO of ThoughtWorks and Sneha Prabhu - Product Manager, ThoughtWorks Products.

Many companies in today's VUCA world are planning to bring enterprise agility. While many frameworks are available in market, what is missing is the mindset, culture and organizational design that is needed to bring enterprise agility. It also demands coordination across entire value chain and various business process that are part of, or impact the software development life cycle. This session will focus on larger context of enterprise agility and what is needed to bring life to agile enterprises.

Every organisation hopes / expects / demands high performance from their employees and teams. It's not very long ago when most effective organisations in the world had a ritual called yearly goal - setting. Many organisations still continue with this where the HR cascades a set of goals set by the organisation's leaders for their employees. This is usually followed by a quarterly to yearly review cycle which with most organisations are linked with incentives. In general terms, there ain't any flaw with this system; goal setting is an efficient way to continuously improve oneself. However, the execution of this process may be flawed and may lead to unoptimized results.

With the advent of business agility, this focus shifted towards continuously learning & improving organisations. This meant that faster feedback was highly recommended for performance improvement and the idea of year-long goal setting seemed a talk of the yesteryears. Many organisations embraced this change by completely abolishing the yearly goal setting practice and instead relying on mentor relationships for an individual's performance improvement. This did improve relationships at the same time hindered transparency since the organisation goals were no longer directly accessed by every employee.

When seen from the perspective of game theory, it's evident that optimum results are obtained when employees achieve goals which are highly beneficial to them at the same time aligned with the organisation's goals. With the former approach explained above, it's pretty clear that the employees in the first case were aware of the organisation's goals, even if the goals were not aligned with their personal goals. Whereas in the latter case, the lack of transparency meant that the individual's goals were highly focused and may not be in-line with the organisation's objectives.

This is where Performance Kaizen aligns these two systems with a flavour of Management 3.0 in order to create an optimum setup where high performing individuals, teams, and organisations can thrive. In this session, we present a case study of this implementation at Springer Nature along with our results and learnings; followed by a brief hands-on exercise for the attendees.

One of the key reasons for embracing agility is faster feedback which helps improve the perceived quality of a software product. And every team is focused towards delivering quality, no one wakes up in the morning with an idea to introduce defects, we naturally ideate to solve problems. Unknowingly though, dysfunctions always creep in and identifying a dysfunction is extremely difficult especially when you are a part of the dysfunction.

In this 45 min talk, I discuss about the importance of quality and how it's no longer negotiable even if Project Management principles tell us otherwise. I share stories from my past experience, and from organisations ranging from GM to Mumbai Dabbawalas that have embraced the "Quality is not Negotiable" principle and seen the difference.

I present the context of defect severity and how these may create an illusion of quality; how accountability of a single person (e.g.: Product Owner) may result in a "Lack of Commitment" dysfunction; and how cost is not really proportional to quality especially when it comes to delivering virtual products and services related to it.

I end the talk with practices that help build in quality and in the interest of an interactive session, many of these scenarios turn out to be debates since the context may differ; these debates are always good ways to solve problems (moving away from "Fear of Conflict").

This talk is based on my article titled The Entropic Future of Software Quality

In a world where businesses are increasingly becoming tech-led, three new types of businesses have evolved:

- Physical, now digital: Brick and mortar businesses are replaced with fully online models. Netflix is a fantastic example of having revolutionized the traditional cable companies.

- Digital native: Products that would never have existed if the technology for it hadn't come first, like FitBits.

- Digital engines: Businesses that power other digital businesses. Amazon Web Services is the engine that drives a phenomenal number of modern day businesses

In all, business models are evolving, and technology is at the heart of it all. This pushes the boundaries on how we solution, analyze, develop and measure. The role of business analysts has to evolve to be catalysts for re-imagining how technology is leveraged for future businesses.

In this talk, we talk about the paradigm shift in technology and businesses, the unique role that Agile Business Analysts can play, and the new age Agile Manifesto.

In the era of digital transformation, enterprises want to be responsive and innovative. They adopt agile practices to help with this but there are few success stories. Moreover, most success is limited to the team level. There are deep cultural shifts required to be successful in the new world and one of the biggest elements that stops organizations from succeeding in the technology space is fear of failure. This crippling fear works at all levels from individuals to departments and business units and it is imperative for organizations to take bold steps to eradicate it.

This talk will explain what's at stake because of the fear of failure and a few ways in which enterprises can tackle it.

In past few years, it has become quite common for software development teams to be distributed across time-zones and comprise of multiple vendors with 50-100+ people.

Agile practices encourage in-person interactions to foster collaboration, whereas, distributed and large teams force communication into the opposite direction. Therefore, it is important to achieve agility albeit with different, or modified mechanics, that work well for distributed and large team.

In this talk I am going to share talk about ways of working effectively in distribute teams with examples from real projects and tools and techniques for achieving great results.

• How do we shift the mindset of team members from ‘my work’, ‘my job’ ‘my goals’ to ‘our work’, ‘our project’ & ‘our objectives’ ?
• Do your team members struggle to trust each other or keep blaming each other?
• Does your team always struggle to meet commitments & deadlines?
• Is the boss always the villain?
• Does adapting to frequent changing customer expectations makes your team uncomfortable?

We’ve all been part of such dysfunctional teams, or may be some of us are there even now.

Our combined experience of over 11 years at ThoughtWorks across domains, highly distributed setups & team sizes makes us believe it is possible to transform any agile team into an empowered team.

We speak about the factors that contribute to empowered teams through stories of projects that achieved the unachievable. We will help you with tweaks to your current recipe of agile team to ensure it transforms into and stays an empowered one.

This talk promises to contain real project experiences from us and people we interviewed across projects .

Continuously monitoring of application quality in production with a purpose of continuous improvement and reduce production support cost. The approach is to collect the data from sources such as social media, app store, and production ticketing solutions. The objective is to analyze the data to provide insights into key quality parameters such as functional performance, security, and usability. The approach helps to holistic view of the application and helps in providing alerts to the development and test teams proactively.