Gregor helps technology leaders transform both their organization and their technology platform. You’ll find him riding the Architect Elevator from the engine room to the penthouse, perhaps automating serverless solutions in the morning and preparing board presentations in the afternoon. His favorite pastime is dissecting buzzwords and replacing them with meaningful decisions and architectural trade-offs.
Gregor has served as Director at AWS and Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO, as Smart Nation Fellow to the Singapore government, and as Chief Architect at Allianz SE, where he oversaw the architecture of a global data center consolidation and deployed the first private cloud software delivery platform.
Let’s be honest, the tech we have today is amazing but it can also be complex. So, it’s only natural that the platforms we build want to hide that complexity to improve productivity, avoid mistakes, and reduce cognitive load. So, the more complexity we can hide, the better our platform? Actually no - we need to be careful that we create useful abstractions, not dangerous illusions. This talk reflects on two decades of building complex distributed systems, highlighting where abstractions helped and where illusions led to major disappointments.
Are architects supposed to be the smartest people on the team, making all the important decisions for developers to fill in the blanks? Certainly not. Rather, architects make everyone else smarter, for example by sharing decision models or revealing blind spots. Architects also communicate across many organizational layers by using models and metaphors. This talk reflects on two decades working as an architect, ranging from the executive penthouse to the serverless engine room.
Most modern applications are distributed, integrate with third-party services, and expose APIs. And although the cloud, serverless, and automation have made distributed systems management easier, fundamental challenges like coupling, latency, or delivery semantics remain.
As the “Fallacies of Distributed Computing” are widely documented (and largely focus on the network and transport layer), it’s time to discuss some truths about distributed system design that focus on coupling, in-order delivery, retries, and control flow.
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