Presentation: TweetRadical Agility with Autonomous Teams and Microservices in the Cloud

What we've built at Zalando is complex. Supporting – profitably – a publicly traded ecommerce company that does business in 15 diverse European markets, with more than 14 million users who all speak different languages, use different payment methods, prefer different shipping methods, and have different product tastes, has required nonstop innovation. Until recently we've focused on building a unified, comprehensive retail system, quickly, that solves just our problems. But to truly fight against complexity--particularly the accidental complexity that slows down our development process--we have adopted a microservices architecture. And when it comes to DevOps, we’ve gone a step beyond the "You build it, you run it" motto--working in autonomous teams with DevOps treated as a "first-class entity.”

In this talk, Jan Löffler (Head of Platform Engineering) will share Zalando's experience implementing “Radical Agility” from a DevOps perspective. “Radical Agility” is the Zalando technology team’s multi-pronged approach to managing the complexity that results from building an architecture of massive size. Jan will focus on how microservices enable Zalando’s engineers to move faster and build systems that scale, at scale, and avoid dependencies. He will show how microservices, in conjunction with a cloud infrastructure, support teams as they try strive for autonomy. Finally, he will draw upon his experiences to show how this all works in practice, and discuss what is organizationally and architecturally necessary to make DevOps a top priority for all members of your tech organization.

Value of talk: Attendees will learn how to scale a massive-size tech organization while keeping innovation alive. They will get insights about how organization, architecture and infrastructure depend on each other.