Conference Speakers
Cassiano Aquino
Senior Staff Engineer, Zendesk International Ltd.
I've started my career in the early years of the internet on Brazil, working on some small ISP's at the time.
Someone that has the same experience knows what I'm talking about, small ISP's are a great school, it's a magical place where at the beginning of the day you will crimp ethernet cables and build a desktop machines to be used as servers and by the end of the day you will be configuring BGP and databases and shaped into what I am now, a generalist.
You learn to love everything related to technology and stop worrying about the name, you like the feeling of creating a solution, to solve a problem.
Every piece of technology that you put together is like a son to you, some kind of piece of art that you need to put it on a kind of imaginary "art museum" to show to anyone that wants to see.
If you like me, is proud of every single line of command that you used in a different way, you know the feeling that I'm talking about.
Presentation: Seeing the Light at Zendesk with NGINX Plus
Satori is the sudden achievement of enlightenment. At Zendesk, we build and deliver software for better customer relationships. We are experiencing satori in application development and delivery through company-wide adoption and implementation of NGINX Plus. We look forward to sharing how we use Chef to manage NGINX and why NGINX Plus contributes to our peace of mind. Going forward, we will use NGINX products and related tools, existing and new, to share the light with our fast-growing base of customers worldwide.
Roman Arutyunyan
Developer, NGINX, Inc.
Roman is a member of the core development team at NGINX. He contributes to a variety of open source and commercial features including HTTP and TCP/UDP proxying, caching, and video streaming. He manages several open source third-party NGINX modules, including the RTMP streaming module. Prior to NGINX, Roman was developing distributed storage systems and video streaming solutions.
Presentation: Developing NGINX Modules
This course is sold out. To be placed on a list for future modules-related training, please email bob.worobec@nginx.com
Developing NGINX Modules is a hands-on class that will give you the foundation you need to begin extending NGINX functionality with NGINX modules. The class will begin with a discussion of when and why a new NGINX module might be the best solution for you. We'll then guide you through the development process from the point of view of a first time developer: obstacles encountered and how they were overcome, with particular attention to the sites, blogs, and queries that were most helpful. Next, you'll dive into NGINX internals – the code that is NGINX. You'll get an architectural overview, deep dives into how connections are handled, data types and structures, memory, module structure, and NGINX coding best-practices. You'll then write a simple hello_world module, exploring the build process, dynamic vs static modules, and how to specify its directives. You'll then write and execute tests for your module. Following the hello_world module, you'll write simple access, header filter, and body filter modules. We'll discuss the NGINX Certified Module program, best practices for module development, and the resources we've made available to you. The class wraps up with a panel discussion with our instructors – Valentin Bartenev, Roman Arutyunyan, and Aidan Carson.
Objectives After completing this class you will be able to:
- Describe NGINX internal architecture
- Explain core aspects of NGINX code in the context of module development
- Describe requirements for successful NGINX modules
- Get the resources you need to begin module development
- Create a simple content module
- Create a simple access module
- Create a simple header filter module
- Create a simple body filter module
Audience Developing NGINX Modules is for architects and developers who are interested in extending NGINX core functionality for specific business purposes.
Prerequisites Developing NGINX Modules is intended for developers and advanced administrators with prior development experience. C/C++ and systems programing is recommended. Basic knowledge of configuring, troubleshooting and administering NGINX is highly advised. Although not a requirement, it's ideal for attendees to have taken the NGINX Core course before attending Developing NGINX Modules.
Valentin Bartenev
Core Developer, NGINX, Inc.
Valentin was already experienced with developing NGINX modules when he joined NGINX, Inc. just a few months after the company was established. Since then, he has worked on implementing new features and fixing bugs in open source NGINX and NGINX Plus for almost six years now. He is mostly known for his work on SPDY and HTTP/2 modules, thread pools, and various improvements on Linux.
Presentation: Open Source Project Deep Dive
In this session, we'll demo and deep dive into our new Open Source Project.
Mike Belov
Director of Engineering, SaaS, NGINX, Inc.
Currently, I work for Nginx as a Director of Engineering and I manage development and operations for Nginx Amplify. Before Nginx I worked for Yandex, one of the top-3 IT companies in Russia. At Yandex I worked in different roles starting from Senior Developer. My latest position was Head of Division at Yandex.Disk service - the largest cloud storage in Russia which works for millions of users per day and stores terabytes of data.
Presentation: NGINX Amplify: How We Collect 1B Metrics Per Day
In this talk, I'm going to speak about how we built the backend of NGINX Amplify, our monitoring and analytic service for NGINX. I will cover our technological stack, our main components. I'll talk about the design and implementation of our timeseries storage. I will share all challenges we faced during the development and operations processes.
Liam Crilly
Director of Product Management, NGINX, Inc.
Liam Crilly, Director of Product Management at NGINX, Inc., has 20 years experience in the Internet industry. He knew it was going to be a big deal when he wrote his first web app in 1993, at the dawn of the graphical Internet. Liam has held various product management roles from startups to multinational organizations.
Presentation: Encrypting, Authenticating and Load Balancing MQTT Traffic with NGINX Plus and nginScript
MQTT is a lightweight, open and scalable protocol that was originally published in 1999 for communication with remote oil fields. It was updated for IoT use cases in 2013 and has since become one of the top protocols of choice for many IoT deployments. With the increased production IoT deployments and the staggering amount of devices connecting to MQTT brokers, the demand for a high performant load balancer with advanced functionality is more than ever a critical factor to the success of their implementation.
In this presentation, I will give a detailed overview of the problem we set out to solve for HiveMQ around security and load balancing. To improve IoT security, it is best practice to use TLS to encrypt the MQTT data passing between clients and upstream servers. We will look in depth at how NGINX Plus can be used to easily offload this process facilitating the encrypted transport. We will look at how an additional layer of security using client certificate authentication and a powerful scripting language called nginScript can be used to harden an MQTT deployment and in turn ensuring that messages are received are from a trusted and genuine device.
Lastly, we set out to solve an issue of application persistence in an internet facing production deployment. In many cases IoT devices are connecting over the internet and building a session based on their IP address becomes unreliable, for this the session is identified by the clientId provided by the client on connection establishment. We will showcase how nginScript is used to extract this unique client identifier from the initial connection passing through NGINX Plus and in turn is used to build a sticky session to the backend server.
This solution has been implemented and in turn helped solve issues around security hardening, offloading of TLS encryption of the MQTT transport and has allowed the implantation of a platform agnostic approach to proxying and load balancing within the applications infrastructure.
Damian Curry
Technical Solutions Architect, NGINX, Inc.
Presentation: Autoscaling with NGINX Plus on AWS and Other Cool Stuff
AWS offers a few ways to autoscale your environments, but it is easy to end up with a lot of ELB's and a overly complicated network stack. In this talk I will show you how you can simplify your AWS env leveraging the tools and functionality provided by NGINX Plus.
Dragos Dascalita Haut
Project Lead, Adobe Systems
Project lead for Adobe I/O, working with a fantastic international team on scaling Adobe’s Products and Services using a distributed serverless platform called Adobe I/O Runtime. Dragos prefers dynamic programming languages over static ones, dogs over cats, and like a true cloud-native developer, has no hesitation taking on challenges of scale, like fighting 100 duck-sized horses.
Presentation: Not All Microservices Are Created Equal ... Some Are Serverless
As the industry gained experience with microservices, so did our understanding about them evolved. The momentum created by simplifying services at a micro level has brought forth a new way of thinking at a more granular level; we call it “serverless”. We don’t know whether it’s going to replace microservices, but what we know for sure is that it’s changing the way we think of services ... especially servers.
Serverless architectures promote the idea of no servers, but does this mean that soon we won’t have to think of running web servers on our own ? Does NGINX play a role in this new architecture ? Is it so much more efficient for us to care about ?
Join this session to talk about these questions and see what role NGINX could play in this picture. To help us in our journey we'll use cloud serverless platforms, as well as open source solutions in order to look at some practical examples, and to draw some conclusions.
Joshua DeWald
Senior Engineer, StackPath
I have worked at MaxCDN (now part of StackPath) since 2013. My main responsibility has been in the provisioning system which translates customer configurations into a form that our edges can use. This is largely in the form of NGINX configurations. I also work closely with our amazing support team on customer troubleshooting
Presentation: NGINX and CDNs: A Perfect Match?
NGINX powers many of the biggest and best CDNs used by websites and web applications today. Why did they choose NGINX? What have they learned about NGINX that can benefit all users? And, how do they differentiate their NGINX-based offerings? Come to our panel discussion and hear from the experts at Distil Networks, Cloudflare, and Stackpath.
Shaun Empie
Technical Solutions Architect, NGINX, Inc.
Shaun Empie is a Technical Solutions Architect at NGINX, Inc. assisting NGINX customers with proof of concept testing, architecture design, and ensuring they are ready to use NGINX Plus effectively. Shaun has been working in the ADC space for 7+ years.
Presentation: Secure your Apps with NGINX and the ModSecurity WAF
The NGINX with ModSecurity WAF (web application firewall) protects your applications from a wide variety of threats, including DDoS and Layer 7 attacks. Improve application uptime, block malicious users, and log crucial data about suspicious transactions with this new offering from NGINX.
The NGINX with ModSecurity WAF is built on a new architecture. The new WAF will help you protect your site against top threats and comply with PCI-DSS Requirement 6.6.
Owen Garrett
Head of Products, NGINX, Inc
Owen Garrett leads the product and go-to-market strategy for NGINX’s web acceleration and delivery technologies. Owen has over 15 years of experience in software engineering and product leadership at companies such as Riverbed. Today, Owen uses his technical and management expertise to optimize NGINX products and customer satisfaction.
Presentation: NGINX Amplify - NGINX Expertise for Everyone
NGINX Amplify provides deep diagnostics with security recommendations, actionable insights, and customizable alerts to improve app performance. This keynote will cover what's new, and where the future lies.
Presentation: NGINX: Past, Present, and Future
In this keynote by our Head of Products, Owen Garrett, you’ll hear about the latest and greatest from NGINX; including a recap of recent product releases, some exciting new features in both our commercial and open source tools, and where we plan to evolve our products in coming months.
Mike Graboski
Sales Engineer, Google
Mike Graboski joined the Google Cloud customer engineering team in February 2013. He has helped dozens of high-profile customers migrate and launch production workloads on Google Cloud. Prior to GCP, Mike spent nearly 2 years on the Google Search Partnerships team and more than 6 years in the ETL/data warehousing space.
Presentation: Running NGINX on Google Cloud Platform - 5 Things You Need to Know
In this 20-minute talk, we'll cover some of the most important topics you should know when setting up NGINX on Google Cloud Platform. We'll touch on best practices for networking, performance, security, and configuration.
Denis Gundarev
Senior Application Architect, VMWare
Denis has more than 15 years of IT industry experience in different roles. Denis focuses on desktop virtualization, security and virtualization. He is a technologist at heart with a passion for defining technology strategies that fit the business, and practically implementing systems in line with initiatives.
Presentation: How to Describe PKI and TLS to Your Mom or Your Boss
Most of you heard about recent SSL vulnerabilities and most of you know how to update your OpenSSL or how to disable some weak cipher in nginx.
But do you know what is cipher and why some ciphers are disabled by default even they are secure? Do you need a certificate from a public certification authority? And if you do, should it be an Extended Validation Certificate or something cheaper? Or maybe you think that your servers became slower because security forced you to use 4096-bit RSA keys instead of 1024-bit keys you used before?
If you are in doubt, come this session and you will find the answers. Also you will get:
- Knowledge that you need to fight with security department
- Simple explanation of PKI that you can use to describe your work to your mom
- Easy to follow security hardening recommendations
A.J. Hunyady
Sr. Director Product Management, NGINX, Inc.
A.J. Hunyady is a technology enthusiast, a Silicon Valley veteran. As seen at last year’s nginx.conf, A.J. is also a pioneer in developing software for managing containerized services in highly dynamic environments. A.J. is now at NGINX, where he's a leader in new product development.
Presentation: Deploying NGINX Proxy in an Istio Service Mesh
In this session, we'll demo and dive deeper into one of the product announcements delivered during the morning's keynote.
Stepan Ilyin
Co-Founder, Wallarm
Stepan is a co-founder of Wallarm, Y Combinator-backed company, which provides AI-driven security for modern applications and APIs.
Presentation: Application and API Security with NGINX: New Tricks and Old Ones
NGINX is a perfect spot to inspect traffic for malicious requests. A set of dynamic modules and tricks can add security layer right on your load balancer/webserver.
How to mitigate OWASP Top10 and L7 DDoS attacks, stop scrapping bots, and make NGINX configuration secure? We'll cover a set of new techniques and a variety of proven-with-time tricks during this talk.
Lef Ioannidis
Architect, UnifyID
Lef Ioannidis is the Architect at UnifyID. Security Engineer at Apple before. Based in San Francisco, UnifyID has been established as the pioneer in implicit authentication. We want to send passwords and two-factor authentication the way of the floppy drive. Won 1st place in the RSA Innovation Sandbox competition in 2017, 1st place in Security and Privacy category, SXSW in 2017, and Runner-up in TechCrunch Disrupt in 2016. Lef was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, received his B.Sc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT where he did research in Compilers and Security. Lef plays the electric guitar in the Boom Boom Room in Filmore St, San Francisco, CA from time to time.
Presentation: Data-aware nginx for Distributed Machine Learning
In my talk I’ll show how we leveraged nginx modules to make a data-aware load-balancer in order to scale our Machine Learning back-end at UnifyID. Our ML back-end is capable of servicing 100+ million users. Workloads require both CPU and GPU intensive computations.
We’ll be demonstrating how we are running machine learning, docker microservices on AWS instances and how we have tackled some problems often seen when deploying Machine Learning clusters in production. Issues addressed include but not limited to:
- Horizontal scaling and statefullness
- Data-based load balancing and workload distribution.
- Message passing distributed model.
- No shared memory model
For Machine Learning we are leveraging multiple APIs (TensorFlow, Caffe, Torch) by creating a uniform API for ML microservices. Running unreliable, academic quality code reliably in production. Open source repositories relevant to this talk will be included.
Alexey Ivanov
SRE, Dropbox
I'm an SRE. As part of Dropbox Traffic Team I'm responsible for Edge network: its reliability, performance, and efficiency.
Presentation: Optimizing Webservers for High Throughput and Low Latency
Dropbox Edge Network is an nginx-based proxy tier designed to handle both latency-sensitive metadata transactions and high-throughput data transfers. We are going to discuss efficiency/performance optimizations of different layers of the proxy stack: starting from drivers and interrupts, through TCP/IP and kernel, to library and application level tunings.
Kevin Jones
Technical Solutions Architect, NGINX, Inc.
Kevin Jones is currently working and living in San Francisco, California as a Technical Solutions Architect for NGINX Software Inc.. Kevin handles the integration and optimization of NGINX for various enterprise companies across the globe. Kevin previously worked as the Lead Site Reliability Engineer for Yellowpages.com in Glendale, CA where he managed a large scale production operations team responsible for automation, management, monitoring and troubleshooting of the company's entire application infrastructure.
Presentation: Building a Powerful, Efficient and Highly Available Caching Layer with NGINX
When people hear the word NGINX, they usually associate the open source platform for its popular adoption as an HTTP web server or load balancer. What a lot of people don't know is the vast amount of powerful features contained in the platform that can be used to build a caching layer and why NGINX is often used as a framework to build powerful, scalable and highly available CDN's (content delivery networks).
In this talk we will dive into each unique NGINX directive and its configuration options that are available. We will show various architectural designs that can be used to build a highly available content cache layer. We will cover various tips and tricks that help with the implantation of NGINX as a content cache server. We will cover various NGINX configuration optimizations that can be critical to your NGINX deployment. Walking away from this presentation, attendees will have the knowledge required to configure basic and advanced caching of their NGINX servers.
Zane Lackey
CSO, Co-Founder, Signal Sciences
Zane Lackey is the Founder/Chief Security Officer at Signal Sciences and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Internet Bug Bounty Program and the US State Department-backed Open Technology Fund. Prior to Signal Sciences, Zane was the Director of Security Engineering at Etsy and a Senior Security Consultant at iSEC Partners.
He has been featured in notable media outlets such as the BBC, Associated Press, Forbes, Wired, CNET, Network World, and SC Magazine. A frequent speaker at top industry conferences, he has presented at BlackHat, RSA, USENIX, Velocity, Microsoft BlueHat, SANS, OWASP, QCon, and has given invited lectures at Facebook, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Federal Trade Commission.
Presentation: Lessons Learned Embracing DevOps + Security
This talk will share the lessons learned at Etsy building and running a security program at the leading edge of the DevOps movement. Specifically it will cover how, when done right, a modern approach to security actually empowers an organization to move faster, rather than act as a blocker.
Robert Markovich
Technical Marketing, Wavefront by VMware
Rob Markovich is a technical marketing executive for the Wavefront by VMware division at VMware. With over 20 years of experience specializing in the monitoring and analytics of large-scale, distributed applications environments – spanning from monolithic to containerized microservices architectures using private, public, and hybrid cloud infrastructures – Markovich has held operational engineering roles with a Fortune 10 global enterprise, and later with leading monitoring platform vendors. He was a co-founder at Visual Networks that grew to a multi-billion dollar IPO, and has held executive roles at Moogsoft, VSS Monitoring (now Netscout), Ayla Networks, Empirix, and Acterna (now Viavi Solutions).
Presentation: Monitoring Microservices Minus the Migraine
Microservices-based applications are all about helping developers to create more functional and more reliable software faster. They also present a big change in the way software is managed, and it carries over to how they are monitored. Microservices can make software more complex and harder to understand its performance and where anomalies lay. This talk will outline the things you should know to establish more effective monitoring as you make your way toward microservices, not only technological but also organizational.
Gordon McFadden
Architect, Intel
Gordon McFadden studied Computer Science at the Technical University of Nova Scotia - now part of Dalhousie University - in Halifax, Nova Scotia. After graduation he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia to work in the thriving software and firmware industry. In 2000, he joined Intel. His passions at work include the details of compression and creating solutions around Intel® QuickAssist Technology that allow accelerated compression to be used in massively scalable solutions. Gordon et al. hold a patent relating to self-testing of processors (US9612930).
Presentation: Intel® QuickAssist Technology in NGINX Payload Compression
In this talk, I'm going to describe our proof-of-concept implantation using Intel® QuickAssist Technology (QAT) to compress payloads. I will introduce our new QATzip library and describe how this was used in place of the traditional zlib library. I'll talk about the performance advantages that we realized and cover some ongoing work, including the state of co-existence for public key exchange accelerated by Intel® QuickAssist Technology and payload compression.
Shreyans Mehta
CTO and Co-founder, Stealth Security
Shreyans Mehta is an innovator in network security and holds several patents in the field. Before co-founding Stealth Security, he was Architect and Technical Director at Symantec, where he led the development of one of the most advanced network security platforms and intrusion prevention technologies based on real-time packet inspection and cloud-based big data analytics. It’s responsible for detecting more than half of the billions of threats that Symantec identifies every year. At Symantec, Shreyans started the Safeweb initiative for marking malicious sites in search results and played a key role in making it a successful standalone product. In partnership with VMware, he developed one of the first agentless IPS engines that transparently protect virtual machines. Before that, he was a lead engineer at VPN Dynamics, a VPN/firewall startup. Shreyans has a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.
Presentation: Breaking Bots: The Good, the Bad and the Unwanted
Not all bot traffic on your website is bad. Blindly blocking all bot traffic can lead to loss of revenue and bad customer experience. Breaking them up based on their intent and then having a fine-grained control over the Bad and the Unwanted keeps them away.
Eugene Morozov
Project Manager, NGINX Amplify, NGINX, Inc.
Eugene is Project Manager for NGINX Amplify. Prior to joining the NGINX Amplify team, Eugene co-founded and ran an infrastructure SaaS. He has spent the last two years helping the early Amplify adopters, learning, and helping the team to develop a better product.
Presentation: Practical Guide to Monitoring NGINX with Amplify
Amplify is a native monitoring tool for NGINX. It is a SaaS developed and operated by Nginx, Inc. Amplify offers an easy way to implement NGINX monitoring, keep track of the infrastructure assets, and improve NGINX configuration with static analyzer. This workshop provides an intro to Amplify — covering various practical aspects such as NGINX metric collection, monitoring a LEMP stack performance, and using Amplify with Docker. We will also explain how to spot trends and keep track of the SLA, use Amplify static analyzer, and how to stay calm but be alert.
Rick Nelson
Head of Pre-sales, NGINX, Inc.
Rick Nelson leads the pre-sales team at NGINX, Inc., the company behind NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus, a fully-supported, commercial version of the high-performance web delivery software. Rick has over thirty years of experience in technical and leadership roles at a variety of technology companies. From virtualization to load balancing to accelerating application delivery, Rick brings deep technical experience and a creative approach to solving business problems for customers.
Presentation: Fun with Health Checks using NGINX Plus and Docker
This presentation demonstrates how NGINX Plus active health checks can be used in a containerized environment to take busy containers out of the load balancing rotation until they have the capacity to accept more requests. It includes examples of different ways to determine that a container is busy.
Luca Passani
CTO, ScientiaMobile, Inc.
Luca Passani is an Italian software engineer with many years of experience in Web and Mobile Internet development. Prior to co-founding his company, ScientiaMobile, inc., Luca has worked for Openwave Systems, AdMob (now part of Google) and taken part in projects for Telecoms in the US and Europe. He is known to the community of developers for identifying the issues of device diversity (an area in which Luca is a recognized expert) as early as 1999. Luca's work has been the basis for further development in this area. In 2001, Luca created WURFL, the Wireless Universal Resource FiLe, product that addresses the challenges of device fragmentation and established itself as the reference framework in the field. He holds a Master in Computer Science from University of Pisa, Italy.
Presentation: Augmenting HTTP with the Missing Headers with the WURFL InFuze Module
Wouldn't it be wonderful if the HTTP protocol told your applications whether the request comes from a Tablet, or a Phone, or a SmartTV or a Desktop? WURFL makes NGINX aware of mobile devices in a Mobile-First world.
WURFL, the industry standard for mobile device detection, has recently been certified as an NGINX Certified Module for NGINX Plus. If you want to understand what device detection is and how your organization can exploit it to its advantage, you don't want to miss this talk. You'll learn new ways to define NGINX policies that weren't previously possible such as directing traffic based on form factor, screen size or retail price of the device, just to name a few.
Elsie Phillips
Community Manager, CoreOS
Elsie herds the CoreOS Community and Co-Leads the Kubernetes Contributor Experience SIG. She’s a Northwest native who got her start in open source working at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab. In her free time she throws wild one-woman dance parties and makes a mean vegan chocolate chip cookie.
Presentation: The Business of Open Source (or, how we think about it at CoreOS)
Peter Levine, a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz, famously said Red Hat would be the last successful OSS business. A dire forecast for the multitudes building their business atop of open source today. This talk will dive into basic economic theory, how we’ve applied it at CoreOS, and ultimately describe what the current and next generation of open source business looks like.
We’ll explore basic concepts of economic theory like Complementary Markets, the Principal-Agent Problem, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the Market for Lemons. We’ll then apply these concepts to our experience building open source at CoreOS. This includes projects like Container Linux, Flannel, and more.
We’ll weigh questions like: What projects are good candidates for open source versus proprietary? How does one evaluate the health of an OSS project? What biz models exist beyond “selling support”?
This talk should be interesting to any developer who’s wondered how OSS is funded and why it’s a predominant model.
Mitch Pirtle
Director, Tech Fellows Program, Capital One
Founding companies and FOSS projects for the past two decades. My entrepreneurial involvement includes Apple, Sun, Sequent (now IBM), ClassMates,com, Starbucks, Microsoft, MTV, Food Networks, Gilt, National Geographic, Sesame Workshop, and MongoDB. I'm most known on the Open Source side for founding the Joomla! content management system, as well as contributing to MongoDB, Li3, and many other libraries and frameworks. My tech background is that of a true polyglot: Go, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB, Redis, Node.js, and all UNIX variants. An active international speaker, I'm often speaking about developer workflow, automation, growth, and change.
Presentation: Coping with the Polyglot Enterprise
Mitch explains the pain of being a polyglot enterprise, as well as discuss different approaches to manage growth, scale and evolution. From tooling to manage public cloud vendor dependence to continuous delivery and automated deployment, he demonstrates ways to innovate, mitigate risk and ensure reliability and performance.
Michael Pleshakov
Platform Integration Engineer, NGINX, Inc.
Michael is a Platform Integration Engineer at NGINX, Inc. in Cambridge UK. He works on developing NGINX integration solutions for various modern platforms, such as Kubernetes or AWS, assists technology partners with NGINX expertise, writes technical blog posts and deployment guides.
Presentation: Using NGINX Plus as an Ingress Controller for Load Balancing Applications on Kubernetes
Kubernetes lets you easily deploy and manage containerized application across a cluster of machines. Load balancing is a critical part of any resilient high-performance web application. Using NGINX Plus as an Ingress controller allows you to leverage the power of NGINX for load balancing applications on Kubernetes. This September NGINX, Inc are releasing version 1.0 of the Ingress controller solution, making it fully supported and production-ready.
In this talk we’ll show how to use NGINX Plus as an Ingress controller:
- Deploy NGINX Plus with the Ingress controller solution.
- Configure load balancing for a web application using an Ingress resource.
- Support advanced load balancing requirements, such as Authentication or Session Persistence, using Annotations.
- Fine-tune NGINX Plus configuration using a ConfigMap resource.
- Extend the Ingress controller to support any special requirements.
- Collect metrics and logs from NGINX Plus.
We’ll conclude the talk showing an alternative method of deploying NGINX Plus on Kubernetes without using Ingress.
Ivan Poluyanov
Head of Frontend Development [Amplify], NGINX, Inc.
Head of frontend development at NGINX Amplify. Previously, I was head of frontend development at Rambler (place where NGINX was born), Mail.Ru (biggest email service in Europe) and Lamoda (biggest fashion e-commerce in CIS). In love with web, javascript and NGINX :)
Presentation: WebP Format Support in Image_filter and Other JPEG-encoding Backends
The most undervalued and useful module is image_filter.
In this talk, I will describe how to create image resize microservice with using nginx only, and will show you how to start using WebP format to speed up loading of images and save up to 20% of traffic even you have huge JPEG collection only.
Another part of talk will be devoted to comparison of actual JPEG encoding backends like mozjpeg and guetzli.
Gus Robertson
CEO, NGINX, Inc.
Gus Robertson serves as Chief Executive Officer of NGINX and is a seasoned leader in the technology industry, including companies such as Microsoft, Visio, Lexmark, and Red Hat. Gus has a proven track record of building successful commercial offerings, strengthening open source communities, and driving customer loyalty.
Presentation: Speeding Innovation: How NGINX Helps You Deliver Change, Faster and Better
Gus will talk about how NGINX software has enabled rapid innovation in web application delivery, from the days before the iPhone and Facebook to today. He'll describe why NGINX has risen to a 52% market share for the 100,000 busiest sites on the Web.
Gus will then outline the new, enterprise-ready NGINX Application Delivery Platform, including two new, breakthrough offerings from NGINX. With the NGINX Application Delivery Platform, organizations can achieve new heights of performance, reliability, security, and scale for web applications, and deliver change faster and better.
Ed Robinson
General Manager, NGINX, Inc.
Ed Robinson is General Manager at NGINX in San Francisco, in charge of strategic initiatives across marketing, open source, product and business development.
Presentation: The Future of Open Source at NGINX
NGINX started as an open source project, and the company has invested in both the open source base along with services and extensions for enterprises. What are NGINX’s plans for the future? Hear about the company’s approach to open source, the roadmap we’re investing in and the future plans we have for open source projects and the open source community.
Nick Shadrin
Senior Product Manager, NGINX
Nick Shadrin, Product Manager at NGINX, has over 15 years of experience in Internet technology. He works directly with the core engineering team, and has a technical focus on Linux, networking, HTTP, web apps. Prior to NGINX, Nick worked for various vendors in Europe and the U.S.
Presentation: New Open Source Project Announcement
Join us during this keynote for our exciting new open source project announcement!
Rich Sharples
Sr. Dir. of Product Management, Red Hat
Rich is the Senior Director of Product Management in the Application Platforms Business Group at Red Hat. He has spent the last twenty years evangelizing, using, and designing Enterprise Middleware. He previously worked for Forte Software and Sun Microsystems and as an independent software developer and consultant building large distributed software systems for the space, transport, and energy sectors.
He also serves on the node.js Foundation Board of Directors.
In his spare time he enjoys running, cycling, and anything that gets him outdoors. More information about Rich can be found on his blog, LinkedIn, and you can follow him on Twitter.
Presentation: The Long Arc of Open Collaborative Innovation
From the early days of the mainframe operating systems and the early days of the Internet, we've seen open collaboration push our industry forward in leaps and bounds. Today, everything interesting happening in technology is happening in open source communities such as Kubernetes, OpenStack, Apache, and Eclipse. As organizations rush towards their digital future, we often hear pundits state that all companies today are software companies. I'd say that all companies today are open source companies—we're all dependent on open source and collaborative communities. Open source has won—nobody is even questioning that anymore. Red Hat has been at the forefront of the open source movement for the last 24 years—starting with Linux. We've helped the widespread acceptance of open source in the enterprise, including storage, virtualization, middleware, mobile with JBoss, automation with Ansible, and cloud computing with Linux Containers, OpenShift, Kubernetes, and OpenStack.
Presentation: Trends in Enterprise Application Development
Over the last 20 years, there has been relative stability in the world of software development—platforms like Java EE and .NET have dominated along with languages like Java, C#, C++, and JavaScript. But for software developers, there is far more technology far more accessible than ever before and that's primarily because of the intersection of cloud computing and open source software. Everything about software is changing—from the tools we use to where we deploy it and the very process of software development. AI and ML could even change who writes it! This session explores some of those changes and how they will impact software development organizations.
Floyd Smith
Director of Content Marketing, NGINX, Inc.
Floyd Earl Smith is Director of Content Marketing at NGINX. He's responsible for the blog posts, white papers, ebooks, and webinars that help NGINX inform the application development and delivery community about microservices, DevOps, CI/CD, load balancing, and of course - CDNs. His background includes work for Apple, AltaVista, HSBC, and Visa, and he has degrees from the University of San Francisco and the London School of Economics.
Presentation: NGINX and CDNs: A Perfect Match?
NGINX powers many of the biggest and best CDNs used by websites and web applications today. Why did they choose NGINX? What have they learned about NGINX that can benefit all users? And, how do they differentiate their NGINX-based offerings? Come to our panel discussion and hear from the experts at Distil Networks, Cloudflare, and Stackpath.
Kara Sowles
Manager of Community and Evangelism, Puppet
Kara Sowles is the Manager of Community and Evangelism at Puppet, where she's spent the past 5 years leading strategic planning and implementation of the company's global community programs. She's worked on contributor events, online user-to-user communication spaces, a robust evangelism program aimed at giving employees opportunities to talk about their work, scaling networks of user groups, and content selection for user conferences. She also provides guidance to departments on how their programs interact with and affect the community - and how to make that effect a productive one. After working at Puppet during the day, she enjoys going home and making stop-motion animation using real puppets. The irony is not lost on her.
Presentation: Building an Exothermic Community
Join us for this keynote with Kara Sowles, Manager of Community and Evangelism at Puppet.
Andrew Stein
Chief Architect, Distil Networks
A reformed data scraper, Andrew now spends his time building out Distil Networks' bot blocking technology. With a focus on speed and effectiveness, Andrew is now helping make sure that billions of requests are served to humans and blocked from bots.
Presentation: NGINX and CDNs: A Perfect Match?
NGINX powers many of the biggest and best CDNs used by websites and web applications today. Why did they choose NGINX? What have they learned about NGINX that can benefit all users? And, how do they differentiate their NGINX-based offerings? Come to our panel discussion and hear from the experts at Distil Networks, Cloudflare, and Stackpath.
Artem Stepanov
Technical Support Engineer, NGINX, Inc.
NGINX Plus Customer Technical Support engineer
Presentation: NGINX Plus Customer Technical Support. How can we help you?
Behind the scenes of NGINX Plus Customer Technical Support. We are here at any time to help you whichever complex or uncertain issue you are facing. We'll tell about what is going on starting from the query and ending with successful resolving.
Chris Stetson
Chief Architect, Professional Services, NGINX, Inc.
Chris Stetson is the Chief Architect of professional services at NGINX and the Microservices Practice Lead. Prior to joining NGINX he spent 20 years as a developer and architect building web applications. He built many familiar websites including the first version of Sirius Satellite Radio, Visa.com, large parts of Intel.com, Microsoft.com, and Lexus.com. He has built large monolithic systems, service-oriented systems and, most recently, microservices-based systems.
Presentation: Product Announcement
This keynote will focus on our new product announcement.
Nick Sullivan
Head of Cryptography, Cloudflare
Nick Sullivan is a leading cryptography and security technologist. As Head of Cryptography at Cloudflare, a top Internet performance and security company, he is responsible for overseeing all cryptographic products and strategy. He was instrumental in building Cloudflare’s security engineering team and led major projects including as Keyless SSL and TLS 1.3. Prior to joining Cloudflare, he was a digital rights management pioneer, helping build and secure Apple’s multi-billion dollar iTunes store. He holds an MSc in Cryptography, is the author of more than a dozen computer security patents, and regularly speaks at major security conferences.
Presentation: NGINX and CDNs: A Perfect Match?
NGINX powers many of the biggest and best CDNs used by websites and web applications today. Why did they choose NGINX? What have they learned about NGINX that can benefit all users? And, how do they differentiate their NGINX-based offerings? Come to our panel discussion and hear from the experts at Distil Networks, Cloudflare, and Stackpath.
Patrick Synor
Technical Manager, Linux Operations, SolvIT Inc.
I have over 15 years of experience in IT Operations with a recent focus in the past 7-8 years on High Availability Web Application Hosting. I have experience in hosting both internal and public applications, and I have a proven history of success measured in throughput, operational overhead, and uptime. I presently manage a team of Linux Web Hosting Engineers responsible for hosting large scale applications for organizations small and large. We also have strong experience in migrating applications out of traditional infrastructure and into cloud infrastructure. I am also a native tech geek at heart, with a very strong involvement in Linux operations.
Presentation: NGINX+ and Highly Available WebSockets in an Auto-Scaling AWS Environment
In this presentation we plan to highlight some of the challenges associated with migrating applications to the cloud. The particular focus of this presentation is load balancing WebSockets in AWS where the environment is dynamic and the application layer is constantly changing. There are many challenges associated with this architecture, and we were able to overcome them by using a new architecture leveraging NGINX+ as a load balancer to allow for session persistence along with auto discovery of application nodes that are dynamically added and removed. We will cover some of the limitations of the native infrastructure of the AWS environment, value gained by NGINX+ vs the community edition, as well as some examples of configuration and data demonstrating the resiliency and robustness of this particular architecture.
Igor Sysoev
CTO and Co-Founder, NGINX, Inc.
Igor Sysoev’s passion for solving the C10k problem led him to become the author of NGINX, which was initially released in 2004. NGINX’s popularity and use became so widespread that Igor co-founded NGINX, Inc. in 2011. He has 16 years of experience in deeply technical roles and is currently the Chief Technology Officer.
Presentation: New Open Source Project Announcement
Join us during this keynote for our exciting new open source project announcement!
Jason Whittington
Continuous Delivery Architect, Equifax
Jason Whittington is a longtime industry veteran currently working as a Continuous Delivery Architect at Equifax Workforce Solutions in St. Louis, Missouri.
Presentation: NGINX: Managing Continuous Delivery at Enterprise Scale
The reverse-proxy capabilities of nginx are an incredibly powerful way to enable Continuous Delivery patterns like blue-green deploy or canary deploy, not to mention Disaster Recovery. These features are powerful but are not always straightforward at scale - authoring and tracking configuration of multiple nginx clusters can be challenging, Drawing from experiences at Equifax, author Jason Whittington will talk about challenges involved in rolling out nginx and give advice for successful deployment and operation. The talk will include helpful "nginx deployment patterns" that will prove useful to anyone looking to scale out from one nginx instance to dozens or hundreds of clusters.
Matthew Williams
Evangelist, Datadog
Matt Williams is the DevOps Evangelist at Datadog. He is passionate about the power of monitoring and metrics to make large-scale systems stable and manageable. So he tours the country speaking and writing about monitoring with Datadog. When he's not on the road, he's coding. You can find Matt on Twitter at @Technovangelist.
Presentation: Better Metrics Through Scripting
You can't improve what you don't measure, but it can be difficult to get the right metrics from your web platform that help you understand what your applications are doing. Scripting in NGINX and NGINX Plus can help. Lua has been part of NGINX for some years, and recently nginScript has been introduced. Both languages allow you to expand the capabilities of NGINX such as increasing the metrics that NGINX can emit. In this session, we will start with a discussion of what's special about each language and quickly move into examples of how you can use them to add new functionality to NGINX. You will leave this session with a much better understanding of the power of NGINX scripting and specific scripts you can use right away to add better observability to your environment.
Bob Worobec
Training Manager, NGINX, Inc.
Bob Worobec is Training Manager at NGINX. Bob has over twenty years experience in technical training and education. Past employers include Hortonworks, TIBCO Loyalty Lab, Lucidworks, InQuira, Gap, Schwab, and DigitalThink.
Presentation: NGINX Core
NGINX Core is an 8 hour course that provides the foundation you need to administer, configure, and manage NGINX. Through lecture and hands-on activities you implement NGINX as a web server, load balancer, and as a reverse proxy. You'll secure your site with SSL/TLS, improve site performance with caching and compression. And you'll learn how to monitor and troubleshoot your site with live activity monitoring, custom logging, and dynamic server configuration. Whether you are new to NGINX, starting your first NGINX project, or refining your DevOps skills, NGINX Core will give you a grounding you can build on. NGINX Core is also your gateway to more advanced training topics like Microservices Network Architectures with NGINX, and others.
Description If you're new to NGINX, NGINX Core is the place to start. If you’re self-taught, or have some working experience with NGINX, NGINX Core will help you complete your understanding of NGINX. In NGINX Core, you will implement the most common use cases for NGINX - web server, proxy server, and load balancer - in a secure, scalable way. As you do, you'll build a solid foundation for moving on to advanced topics, including more complex security considerations and microservices implementation and architecture.
NGINX Core combines lecture, instructor demos, and hands-on activities to expose participants to NGINX. Participants will be given a pre-configured, personal training environment for class activities. Each lecture and instructor demo in NGINX Core will be followed by hands-on activities in which participants will implement the use case in question. For example, following the lesson on Serving Static Content, participants will implement a basic web server that serves static content in their training environment. As participants complete Proxying Connections, they’ll be adding a simple proxy server scenario to their implementation. In later modules they’ll add security (HTTPS), implement variables and maps, route connections, rewrite and redirect requests, implement a variety of load balancing models, and configure caching.
Objectives
- Serve static content
- Proxy connections to upstream servers
- Configure and customize Logging
- Configure HTTPS & Site Security
- Use Variables in Rewrites, Routing, and Maps
- Route Connections
- Configure Load Balancing for HTTP using the weighted Round Robin, Least Time, Least Connections, Hash, and IP Hash methods
- Enable Live Activity Monitoring of servers and upstreams
- Implement & Manage Caching
- Implement Compression
- Leverage NGINX API to Dynamically Configure servers at runtime
- Install NGINX from binary & from source files
Audience NGINX Core is intended for admins, architects, and DevOps professionals who are self-taught or new to NGINX. NGINX Core will expose you to core functionality through lecture, demonstration, and hands-on labs.
Prerequisites No prior knowledge or experience with NGINX is required. Participants should have a basic understanding of web servers and a basic understanding of the Unix command line. Required skills include running Unix commands, navigating the file system, and creating and editing text files.
Jimmy O. Yang
Multi-faceted actor, stand-up comedian, and writer Jimmy O. Yang is best known for his portrayal of hilarious intern, Jian Yang, on HBO’s Emmy-nominated comedy series, Silicon Valley.
In December 2016, Yang made his feature film debut in CBS Films’ dramatic movie Patriots Day alongside Mark Wahlberg, Kevin Bacon, and John Goodman. His portrayal of student Dun Meng has been lauded by critics as a breakout performance and ‘hero’ of the film. Most recently, Yang wrapped production on Warner Brothers’ comedy Life of the Party starring Melissa McCarthy and directed by Ben Falcone.
Born in Hong Kong, Yang made his television debut on the CBS series 2 Broke Girls and his first late-night stand-up appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show where he received a rare standing ovation. Other television credits include DirecTV’s Things You Shouldn’t Say Past Midnight, CBS’ Battle Creek and Criminal Minds, FXX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. He is currently recurring on TruTV’s half hour comedy series, Those Who Can’t.
Presentation: Closing Keynote
Our closing keynote will feature Jimmy O. Yang, from the HBO hit series 'Silicon Valley'.