Friday, June 6, 2014

The Cloudcast #148 - DevOps, WebScale & BigData at Gilt

Brian talks with Eric Bowman (@ebowman, VP of Architecture at Gilt, @gilttech) about the evolution from monolithic apps to scaleable micro-services. They discuss how to manage scale, how they manage deployments across internal, managed and public clouds. They discuss when to open-source a project and how to engage with open-source communities. Music Credit: Nine Inch Nails (www.nin.com)

Eric Bowman (@ebowman) - VP Architecture @ Gilt.com (@gilttech)


Topic 1 - You're another Reed College graduate (Steve Jobs, Luke Kaines, etc.). What's unique about that environment that is driving all these tech leaders?

Topic 2 -What does Operations look like behind the scenes at Gilt? How do you coordinate between Sales, Inventory, New Products,etc.

Topic 3 - What is "at scale" at Gilt and where have the breaking points been?

Topic 4 -Web-scale companies tend to reference to databases as "infrastructure". What does the database infrastructure look like at Gilt (key-value, scale, performance, resiliency, etc.)?

Topic 5 -What are the popular applications (both user-facing and behind-the-scenes) and how are they architected?  (lots of people still struggle with distributed, micro-services or modular apps vs. monolithic apps)

Topic 6 -When does Gilt decide it's a good idea to open-source projects or concepts? How does that factor into your ability to recruit & hire talent?

Topic 7 - What are the new people at Gilt asked to learn, or where are the interesting areas of learning - both in applications and data (real-time, Hadoop, etc.)?