Conference review: Distributed Matters Berlin 2015

“Kept you waiting, huh?” – to start the post with a pop culture reference.
Yesterday, I was privileged enough to attend Distributed Matters Berlin 2015. The focus of the conference is, you guessed it, distributed systems, often within a NoSQL context. It was hosted at the awesome KulturBrauerei, a refurbished brewery. The format of the conference was 45 minute presentations, including Q&A, thankfully followed by a 15 minute break between talks, in two tracks. The overall level of the presentations was above the average and given that you could only attend one at a time, it made for a hard choice.
Owing to the greatness of Berlin taxi drivers (you know what I am talking about if you used a taxi in Berlin recently), I managed to attend only half of the keynote by @aphyr, so I am not going to comment on this one. My main takeaway is “always, always read the documentation carefully”.
The next presentation I attended was NoSQL meets Microservices, by Michael Hackstein. This one was labelled as beginner. It presented the main paradigms of the NoSQL landscape (KV/Graph/Document), certain topologies and then a presentation of the new-ish ArangoDB, a NoSQL based on V8 Javascript that claims to support all three paradigms at once, eliminating the need for multiple network hops. Overall, it was well presented, if a tad on the product side, and it served nicely to kickoff my conference experience.
After the coffee break, where I was lucky enough to meet some old colleagues from $DAYJOB-1, I attended A tale of queues, from ActiveMQ over Hazelcast to Disque. @xeraa presented his journey with various queueing solutions. He kicked off by stating that the hard problem in distributed systems is exactly once delivery and guaranteed delivery. He then presented the landscape of existing message queues, giving the rationale behind deciding what to use and, more importantly, what not to use. The talk was quite technical, giving me a lot of pointers for future research, overall a solid talk, well done!
It was followed by @pcalcado and No Free Lunch, Indeed: Three Years of Microservices at Soundcloud. Phil has amazing presentation skills and described the journey of Soundcloud from a monolithic Ruby on Rails app, towards a microservices oriented architecture. What I liked most about this presentation was not just the great technical content but also the honestly. Evolving your architecture is no trivial task and the road to it is full of potential pitfalls. Phil was kind enough to share some of his hard gained experience with us, greatly appreciated.
The lunch break was BAD, ’nuff said. Too long a queue and the food, by the time I got there, the good stuff was gone.
After the lunch, I attended Scalable and Cost Efficient Server Architecture by Matti Palosuo. One of the more solid talks, this no-frills presentation did what said on the tin: presented the service infrastructure behind EA’s Sim City Build It mobile title. Dealing with mobile, casual games  presents a unique challenge service-wise and Matti covered all angles in his presentation, diving deep into specifics of their implementation.
The next presentation was Containers! Containers! Containers! And now? by Michael Hausenblas. I am not going to comment a lot on this one, since it had no slides and it was more like a tech demo. Mesos is an AMAZING product and I would have preferred some technical discussion, as opposed to a hands-on demo, but hey! this is just me.
Microservices with Netflix OSS and Spring Cloud by Arnaud Cogoluegnes was the next presentation that I attended. It focused on FOSS software by Netflix and how it can be utilized by the form of Java decorators within an application context. Useful and well presented, the only thing I personally did not like was certain slides full of code but this does not take away from the value of the presentation. Bonus point is that, for a Java engineer, this presentation was immediately actionable, with some nice coding takeaways.
Before proceeding with the next presentation, the astute reader of this blog should have noticed by now a pattern forming: microservices. The topic of the next talk was no exception Microservices – stress-free and without increased heart-attack risk by Uwe Friedrichsen. I really loved this talk. Uwe has a strong opinion regarding microservices (and the experience to back it up). In a nutshell, while microservices can be viable, one should keep a clear head and not fall into the trap of hype-driven architecture. This was my favorite talk of the conference and without further ado, here are the slides. I cannot speak more highly about this presentation so please, have a look at the slides. It was extremely nice to deconstruct the microservices hype and present a realistic case.
It was time for the last talk. The choice was between Antirez’s disque implementation talk and Just Queue it! by Marcos Placona. I decided to give the underdog a chance, given that almost everyone went to Antirez’s presentation (which I am sure it was excellent) and went to Marcos’ presentation instead. I was not disappointed, Marcos described his experience with using MQ while migrating a project and gave another overview of the MQ landscape.
After that, I had some food and some orange juice and decided to call it a day. Overall, it was quite a nice conference, good talks, not a lot of marketing and I will definitely visit the next one, if I am able. Met some interesting people as well and grabbed a lot of pointers for future research. Kudos to the organizers.
See you in DevOps Days Berlin 2015.