Reactive Summit 2022

WebAssembly was originally used to run code in languages other than JavaScript in a web browser. The browser demands efficient and secure computation which makes WebAssembly equally promising for cloud services and edge computing. This talk will introduce WebAssembly from the point of view of a systems programmer, rather than a web developer. It will include an example of using WebAssembly in the cloud to continue the trend of abstracting more of the run-time into the infrastructure and a motivating example to demonstrate how WebAssembly can be used to flexibly and securely move code from the cloud to the edge. It will conclude with observations and advice and highlight unsolved problems with this emerging technology. WebAssembly has the potential to be the platform executing an enormous amount of IoT computation. It can be used as a product differentiator to provide a competitive advantage by helping design systems with reactive principles like efficient execution, accepting failure, decoupling space and time, and allowing code to be adapted quickly and responsively.

The next generation of connected, electric, and autonomous vehicles are driving the automotive industry to adopt digital twin technology and reactive architectures at significant speed and scale. This is happening in broad and challenging contexts such as automotive assembly, the software-defined vehicle, active safety and autonomous driving systems, and even motorsports racing and spans embedded, edge, cloud, and enterprise environments. Actor systems and reactive streams now enable device-level diagnostics and prognostics, machine learning, simulation and training, activity-based and crowd-sourced intelligence, and so much more. Doug's talk will discuss the domain-driven design of digital twins in several of these scenarios, investigate some of the reactive streams integrations that inform their behavior and state, and then conclude by providing some perspective on the opportunities, obstacles, and possible outcomes of this exciting journey.

Building out Reactive systems can be a lot of work. There’s a lot of infrastructure to set up and designing a system to be resilient, responsive, and elastic requires experience and time that not every team has. We built Inngest to be an open source, cloud-native system that enables anyone to build Reactive architectures. Designed to be pluggable with your favorite messaging service like Kafka, NATS or PubSub and your favorite container orchestration like Kubernetes, Nomad, or ECS. We’ll walk through how the system was designed, how you can deploy it yourself, and the plans to make it runnable on any cloud (and even your laptop!).

All aspects of event-driven design, streaming technology, and real-time systems essentially revolve around how we see data as events, how we model events and essentially the transition and transformations over the data. The pitfalls often come from thinking a domain itself like a legacy. I would present ten such practices which a team can keep in mind to ensure their event streaming work stays successful and impactful

1. Setting Expectations
2. You Are Not Trying To Build Legacy 2.0
3. Be Aware Of Business Gerunds
4. Don't Overinvest In A Single Platform
5. Upskilling With New Development Paradigms
6. Processing Topology Debugging Can Be Extremely Challenging
7. An Inefficient Topology/Data Pipeline Can Have Lasting Consequences
8. Handling Stateful Workloads
9. Frequently Changing Needs Can Pose Challenges
10. Centralized Ownership Can Be An Existential Threat

The above ten practices would be presented while showing actual examples of what happened while developing and what could have been understood and done better, in a lucid way

(Also based on my recently published article https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/05/19/10-best-practices-for-event-streaming-success/)

Back in 2020, Qonteo was founded. A startup initiative specialized in biometric technologies, Image processing and Data analytics. In a period of 3 month, Qonteo started to receive a quite a few requests to demonstrate and pilot its solutions, and a decision had to be made about software design, architecture and infrastructure to support our ideas, spending the minimal resources (in a minimalist approach), keeping costs low while we could escalate demos through multiple clients in order to catalyze their business revenue. From Legacy to Reactive Application Modernization, this lecture involves Reactive Computing at the edge, streaming machine learning, and deep learning algorithms, new trends in image recognition, processing and data presentation, serverless/Cloud architecture and use cases in which reactive principles are applied. AS well as Systems Fundamentals and programing in different layers and levels of abstraction. There will be presented a real time demo, with the whole chain of software engineering involved, such as backend, front end and middleware integration and their programing stacks.

Despite their many benefits, distributed reactive systems pose new challenges when it comes to operability. In their presentation "Observing failure in Reactive Systems", Jonathan and Clemens will walk through some examples from a holistic systems perspective. These will include key metrics to visualize, how to identify lack of isolation, cascading failures, data visibility, infrastructure metrics, business metrics, and critical log messages. These lessons are based on supporting live reactive systems processing data in a production environment.

As developers, our job is to create value by writing code. We write code to solve business challenges and create value for our companies or customers. But writing code is just one part of it. We need to understand how and where it will run, how it will perform under load, how we will scale it out, etc. Imagine a world where we can focus on the essence of our job, which is creating value through code. Imagine if we could declaratively express what needs to happen and not care how it will be executed. A world where we can focus on data modelling and code, instead of infrastructure and database tables. Now, on top of that, imagine if such an application simply complies with the Reactive Principles. Wouldn't that be cool? Well, that's what Kalix has to offer. In this talk, we will walk you through the main concepts in Kalix. You will learn how to build a Kalix application by composing Kalix components and deploying it to production in no time.