At NorDevCon2024, Alex will be striking a balance between the certainty of technology, and the uncertainty of human nature, using the Amazon Web Services to demonstrate that:

"Some of you will recognise the title of this session as Murphy's law. In this talk, we'll explore this in the context of AWS. Operating a workload in AWS offers the ability for your application to run more reliably and be more resilient to failure. But how? How do you architect for failure? How do you ensure that your application can survive an AWS datacentre failure? Come along and find out the answers to these questions among many more."

We have taken the liberty of asking Alex some more probing questions, and were grateful to receive a very comprehensive set of answers, which we thought would be best put to use by sharing with our community!

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☁️ What inspired you to choose this particular topic for your talk?

Alex: For me, one of the major advantages of operating applications in the cloud is that it enables you to worry less about infrastructure failing. Mechanisms and patterns exist that make recovering from failure easy and fast. I enjoy the challenge of solving problems borne from failure, and figuring out ways to prevent them occurring again. Every application will experience failure at some point, and so I wanted to share this knowledge with the community to help them protect applications from similar scenarios.

☁️ How would you say your talk would benefit the developers, or professionals in other fields?

Alex: Having an understanding of AWS, and how it can help you to operate applications more resiliently is an extremely useful skill set. There's some intricacies in AWS' networking structure that are essential to understand in order to effectively, and efficiently, limit the impact of outages. This talk will not only cover this must-know theory, but will also introduce the practical side and show why certain patterns exist and how to implement them.

☁️ If you could give us 1-3 main takeaways for your upcoming talk, what would they be?

Alex: Let someone else worry about infrastructure failing. Resiliency doesn't have to mean doubling your AWS bill.

☁️ Are there any specific tools, technologies, or frameworks that you will be discussing in your talk?

Alex: Everything's going to be centered around AWS, however the concepts could apply to just about any cloud computing platform. We'll also be using infrastructure as code tools like Terraform or CloudFormation.

☁️ What kind of audience engagement do you prefer, if any?

Alex: Whilst I'm planning to have time at the end of the talk for questions, feel free to chat to me anytime during the conference. I'm also reachable via LinkedIn or Discord for post-conference chat.

☁️ Are there any “teasers” you could give us?

Ale: Given the title of the talk, you might think that a live demo would be tempting fate somewhat. Never mind that! The majority of the talk will be a live demo, with some theory to start with to set the scene. Come along and watch me break things in real-time!

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We, of course, encourage you to meet Alex up close and personal at the upcoming NorDevCon 2024, but if fate has it otherwise, you can also get in touch with him online at https://www.alexkearns.co.uk

If you haven't already, you can, of course, get the tickets to see Alex and other speakers here.

Thanks, Mez, Alex, Ida, & The nor(DEV):con Team