Bastian Hofmann

Even though you tested your application perfectly errors and bugs will still happen in production, especially if other services or databases go down or are under high load. Thus it is very important to see errors happing and to be able to react to them quickly. In this talk I'll introduce you to efficient ways for monitoring and logging for errors and show how you can handle them if they happen, covering deployment strategies, using intelligent circuit breakers and gracefully reducing functionality.

Splitting an application up into multiple independent services can be a good way to keep it scaling and ensure stability and developer productivity in larger, growing teams. But just splitting the codebase, creating APIs and deploying the code on some servers is not enough, somehow your services need to know where and how other services are accessible. Classical approaches like hardcoding everything in every service or having a central load-balancer can quickly lead to problems in terms of scalability and maintainability. In this talk I'll show how we at ResearchGate tackled this challenge. With the help of tools like Consul, linkerd and Kubernetes we created a setup that allows us to quickly boot and shutdown services. This ensures that all servers are utilized optimally and load spikes can be reacted upon quickly and automatically.

It's nothing new that speed is important for the success of any web application. Only a few hundred milliseconds may lie between a user leaving your site or staying. Unfortunately performance problems are oftentimes hard to fix and even harder to pinpoint.
In this talk I will show you how we at ResearchGate measure web application performance, which means not only timing how long the PHP backend took to deliver a page, but also tracking the speed the users actually perceives in the browser. After that you will see how you can track down and analyze any problems you found through measuring with the help of tools like Xdebug, XHProf, Blackfire.io, Tideways.io and the Symfony Debug Toolbar. And if you still need to get faster after optimizing and fixing all these issues, I'll introduce you to some tricks, techniques and patterns to even further decrease load times.

Deploying code changes continuously to your production environment has many benefits. New features get to your users much faster which enables very short and quick iterations on them. And due to the small change sets you tend to encounter less bugs and regressions. In this talk I’ll present what Continuous Deployment means, and what you have to do, step-by-step, to make it work successfully for your project. We will cover topics like trunk based development, feature flags, partial roll outs, continuous integration, deployment automation and application monitoring.