I was on a visit in Israel and went to “Surviving Black Friday & Turning Behavioural Signals Into User Profiles” meetup. It is a very long name which actually implying on 2 talks. The meetup took palce in Sears Israel offices, which is the department behind Shop Your Way.
The first talk – “Surviving Black Friday” was given by Omri Fima who is a resilience tech lead in Sears. Omri talked about resilience and scalability lessons learned based on Black Friday. Every internet shopping site knows that the traffic is much higher on Black Friday, so how can you prepare and test if your system can deal with such a load? What happens if one service fails? What is a graceful failure and what is less graceful? He presented 7 steps to make your service more stable and mentioned few tools both for testing and development.
Pablo Rosenman, VP Development @ Adience gave the second talk – “Turning Behavioural Signals Into User Profiles” (slides, video). Pablo presented 2 of Adience products – Adience SDK and Events SDK and showed how they use AWS services in their pipeline. He talked about Adience pipeline and what were their main concerns and focus when designing and implementing it – scability, decoupling and cost effective. In the end he also presented what they would do differently if they would design it today.
All in all, interesting talks and a very good atmosphere. Looking forward that Omri’s slide will also be available online.
Tom Ron 