Hidden in the clouds: Using Graph Technology to Understand Your Cloud Estate
Neo4j Nodes conference, November 2022
The modern cloud infrastructure we use to deploy our applications put lots of information at our fingertips: consoles, APIs, dashboards, metrics, etc. But despite all this data, at the FT it was hard to feel confident that we had a good grasp of what we were actually running. So we turned to graph technologies – Neo4j and GraphQL – to build a user-friendly picture of multiple AWS accounts. This helps keep our data more secure, saves us money, improves engineering efficiency, and provides instant insights that would previously have taken hours or days of research.
In this session, I share the things that graph allows them to do and outline how you can do something similar using a largely open source set of tools.
ServerFULL: Working with and against state in Lambda
AWS Community Summit, July 2020
The documentation and marketing of AWS Lambda strongly suggest that state is not preserved between Lambda invocations. In this talk, I explore the nuances behind this. I share, with the help of some operational incidents, when it is, and isn’t, safe to use state in a node.js application running on Lambda.
Graph vs graph: GraphQL as the API for your Graph Database
GraphQL Days, Bodensee, September 2019
Most stories of GraphQL implementations focus on retrofitting a GraphQL layer on top of existing APIs to surface the data’s graphiness. But what if you’re starting from scratch and you know you’ll need a graph from day 1 - what role is there for GraphQL when it’s not the only graph representation in your stack. I’ll tell you how, at the FT, we’ve combined a graph database with GraphQL to expose operational information about our business like never before.
A field guide to the Financial Times
neo4j graph tour, London, March 2019
The FT was a microservices pioneer, and our teams had a lot of freedom to pick the tools & processes they wanted. 5 years on, many people have moved on and those innovative projects are now legacy code. I’ll tell you about our journey, using neo4j & graphQL, towards keeping track of it all.
Speeding up without slowing down
DeltaV Conf, London, May 2018
At FT we built one of the world’s fastest media websites, and release to production dozens of times a day. But the architectural and organisational decisions aimed at allowing us to deliver reliable features quickly and consistently don’t always fit neatly with the desire to optimise performance.
In this warts-and-all talk, you’ll learn
-
how we build FT.com
-
how a highly componentised, microservices stack with a rapid release cycle can sometimes get in the way of performance
-
some ideas for working around these obstacles
-
that web performance is hard, and no-one’s perfect
Speeding up without slowing down
LDNWebPerf, London, November 2017
At FT we built one of the world’s fastest media websites, and release to production dozens of times a day. But the architectural and organisational decisions aimed at allowing us to deliver reliable features quickly and consistently don’t always fit neatly with our desire to optimise performance.
In this warts-and-all talk, you’ll learn
-
how we build FT.com
-
how a highly componentised, microservices stack with a rapid release cycle can sometimes get in the way of performance
-
some ideas for working around these obstacles
-
that web performance is hard, and no-one’s perfect
Where are the comments?
LDNWebPerf, London, December 2016
Data and performance tradeoffs on FT.com