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.

Agile Principle # 12 defines that at regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly. From Scrum to Kanban and other agile frameworks, this is accomplished through retrospectives and continuous improvement processes. The key to being a successful agile practitioner is to identify areas of improvement and then experiment ways of improving it. But it doesn't stop there; positive improvements ultimately become success stories for other teams and motivates them to experiment with newer ideas which eventually leads to innovation. A negative outcome isn't bad either since it adds to the experience of situations where ideas may not apply. Thus the key to this process lies in being a child, an explorer, and inculcate an experimentation mindset. The SLICE framework addresses this in the following way:

• S hare: Share an area of improvement
• L earn: Explore the area for ways of improvement
• I mplement: Search & apply the learning to identify the success factors
• C ollateral: Publish blogs, white papers, presentations, etc. as observations of the implementation
• E xpansion: Grow, Seed, and Split in order to explore new venues for success

In this talk, I create an environment that inculcates an experimentation mindset and utilise the SLICE framework to drive the exploration.

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 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 .

The concept of self-service has become a part of everyday life. Enterprises now have the opportunity to create intelligent self-service experience, using real-time, understanding user patterns, identity of the user and provide relevant information. Virtual assistants have started revolutionizing this space, providing real time data.

We all have experienced success stories by following different Agile methodologies. Building virtual assistants (Chatbots) introduces new set of challenges starting from conceptualizing an idea/feature to deployment. As part of this talk, I will be sharing the balanced implementation of agile approach/practices which has worked for us, at every stage of development which includes requirement gathering, writing stories, developer testing, testing, user testing etc.

Design Thinking is an approach to create solutions/products that start and end with the user. It is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternate strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. This hands-on session is an adaptation of the Stanford D.School Virtual Crash Course on Design Thinking. The workshop is a structured framework that anyone can use to build design into their products.

What will we do?

Hands-on experience of early-stage product ideation. The participants will have the experience of taking a problem statement and designing a product that solves it, in a structured manner using tried and tested techniques in industry.

How we will do it?

We will walk through the five stages of product ideation and design, and implement concepts on the example problem as we proceed.

1. Empathy maps and personas.
2. Define the need
3. Product ideation
4. Brainstorm ideas
5. Prototyping and feedback

At the end of the workshop, participants will have learnt to take a problem and convert it into a product idea, and validate it.