Episode 44 - Distributed Systems

What is Megalith? A ten year plan… A distributed “operating system” for the datacenter, the cloud, the entire internet… An idealized design… A series of iterations in a direction… The past 10 years of Jeff Lindsay, and the next 10 years of Jeff Lindsay. We discuss what it is, what it could be, and where it’s headed.

We reflect on over a decade of giving many technical talks and watching many many more. We talk about our evangelism roots with Continuous Deployment and Webhooks both being primarily spread via technical talks. We also discuss dealing with the inevitable stress of giving talks and finally how to make your talks better.

We talk about emergence both theoretically and concretely. How we see emergence everywhere in our daily lives. How viewing systems through the lens of Systems Thinking allows us to optimize for emergence, and leads to less friction in the systems (both technological systems and human systems).

We talk about our personal experiences in Startups and the pros and cons, focusing on the common Startup myths and what companies can look like when you reject some of the common assumptions about what a Startup is.

We talk about our shared history around the long running beer-and-laptop party DevHouse (which Jeff cofounded), and the lessons we’ve learned from organizing meatspace events.

We talk to Daniel X Moore about Serverless Architecture, the future of javascript apps, and the lumberjack-programmer lifestlye that lets him dedicate so much time to opensource.

We talk about DevOps, both theory and practice. We also talk about Configurator, an opensource Configuration-as-an-API, and compare that to existing options like Chef and Pupppet. Finally we discuss Bulat Shakirzyanov’s levels of configuration management.

We talk in depth about Distributed Systems, the Actor Model and contrast Go with Erlang. This launches us into a discussion about Anzen, a new model for developing software.

We talk about Idealized Design, an important tool from Russel Ackoff’s brand of Systems Thinking. We then try something new: we actually run a live Idealized Design session on a topic chosen by the audience.

We discuss why SOA sucks, the Microservices trend and how important it is to consider both technical and people issues at the same time.