A robust and extensible Cloud platform is the foundation on which to build and distribute powerful Software as a Service (SaaS). It provides a common layer upon which you can quickly iterate to deliver specialized services to meet the needs of your end users. So, what exactly is a Cloud platform? And, what lessons, patterns and tools from the Cloud-Native ecosystem can be used to build one?
In this talk, Joni will present a case study into the evolutionary design and implementation of the Diagrid Cloud platform which underpins Diagrid’s SaaS offerings. Joni will walk through the design considerations, trade-offs and learnings from his first hand experience bootstrapping Diagrid’s products. He’ll discuss how to exploit abstractions such as Kubernetes, Dapr and Cloud-Native services to achieve portability, extensibility and evolvability to allow the products to rapidly adapt to the ever changing demands of the business and users.
Interview:
What's the focus of your work these days?
I am currently working at a startup called Diagrid, which has been going for about 2 years, where I lead an engineering team to design and build Cloud services that provide our users (developers in this case) with productive abstractions for developing distributed applications.
What's the motivation for your talk at QCon London 2024?
I’d like to unpack the architecture of a typical Cloud platform and offer some insights into the patterns and tools from the Cloud-Native ecosystem we can leverage when building one. I think a “Cloud” product is starting to become the foundation that companies rely on to quickly iterate and deliver a wide arrange of services, but the base knowledge for building one is locked away in each siloed implementation. In this talk, I aim to highlight the common design challenges and approaches to help demystify what it means to build a cloud.
How would you describe your main persona and target audience for this session?
The target persona for my talk is somebody who is interested in how to deliver software as a service. Ideally, they’d have an interest in Cloud-Native technology and how it can be applied within SaaS and it’ll help to have a good knowledge of software architecture.
Is there anything specific that you'd like people to walk away with after watching your session?
I hope this talk gives the audience inspiration for how they think about delivering their own services and encourages others to share their own approaches to building SaaS publicly so we can all learn from each other. The patterns for building SaaS are largely reusable without giving away any of the secret sauce.
Speaker
Joni Collinge
Founding Software Engineer @Diagrid
Joni is a Founding Software Engineer at Diagrid, building multi-cloud services for managing large-scale Dapr-based microservices in production. His extensive background from over a decade at Microsoft encompasses designing, building, and operating scalable cloud services. Joni is dedicated to solving business challenges with practical, open-source, cost-effective, and maintainable solutions.
Date
Monday Apr 8 / 02:45PM BST ( 50 minutes )
Location
Churchill (Ground Fl.)
