Altitude NYC 2018 recap

3,500 new Fastly service configurations deployed, 250 breakfast sandwiches eaten, 2 rants about edge computing (or at least one about self-driving cars), and one very big outdoor screen. Those are just a few of the highlights from last week’s Altitude in New York, where we gathered together customers and Fastly folks to share stories and strategies about the future of the edge, cloud networking, security, and more.

The massive screen across from the venue was a big hit.

You can watch all the videos from the event here (we've also posted all the presentation slides).

A few highlights

Eddie Roger from Target enthralling everyone about using logs to build beautiful, useful dashboards. We’ll admit, his talk might have given even us a bit of dashboard envy. He also wrote up a detailed post based on the material in his talk.

In a whirlwind tour of modern engineering tools and practices, Crystal Hirschorn of Condé Nast International covered how they serve millions of requests daily across their 62 international brand websites in 11 different countries (all while making sure Anna is happy).

Sarah Dapul-Weberman and Michelle Vu, both software engineers at Pinterest, demonstrated how their own team’s efforts helped make performance a priority for the entire company. Be the change you want to see in the world (and on Pinterest)? Check.

USA TODAY NETWORK’s Platform Team detailed a masterful example of what DevOps is really about. As they migrated over one hundred websites in the USA Today Network, they established the ability to self-service CDN configurations, securely store config files, and spread out the responsibility of managing configurations. Not only did this change the way they deliver media and troubleshoot, it fundamentally changed the way they work

Fastly SVP of Engineering Laine Campbell and Principal Engineer Marcus Barczak beared their souls (and quite a bit of tangled Chef code) to tell a tale of technical debt, defenestration, and redemption.

In the workshops, Peter Bourgon led a fascinating and well-received session on observability, and in the workshop that Andrew Betts ran on programming the edge, participants deployed over 3,500 service configurations in VCL. (Due to technical difficulties — because computers — we don’t have the video from Andrew’s NYC workshop. But fear not, he’s reprising this popular hands-on deep dive at Altitude London in just a few weeks, and we’ll be sure to capture that one on video without issue.)

We also heard from Tom Daly (VP of Infrastructure) on scaling to 10TB in 10 months, and Tyler McMullen (CTO) on the future of edge computing (and why it’s not really all about autonomous cars </rant>).

If you couldn’t join us in New York, you still have two chances this year to make it to Altitude. We’ll be in London on May 22, and we head back to our homefront for a 2-day San Francisco event on Sept 12-13. We hope to see you there!