Data Driven Scaling Booking.com’s Infrastructure

Wednesday, 09:00 to 10:00

Since the day Booking.com started in 1996 we have built and optimised for growth, which has taken us rapidly from a small start-up to one of the world’s leading technology companies. To keep up with this growth we have made some very explicit architecture choices early-on which proved highly effective. We can call the top computer hardware companies and they are happy to provide us with as much iron as we want. However finding talented, data driven engineers is much more difficult. For the technology teams to keep up with our business growth, we needed to scale our architecture and technical infrastructure much faster than what Moore’s Law could give us in terms of improvements in compute power and data storage. Our architectural focus has been not to make it “pretty” but to make it work quickly and pragmatically, following the needs of our customers which always come first. This resulted in an architecture that allowed our business to grow into one of the most successful global eCommerce companies. This keynote discusses the evolution of the Booking.com software architecture over the last 20 years, the major design decisions that we have made to support the phenomenal business growth and provides an insight into the key software architecture concerns that we face going forward.

Brendan Bank
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Booking.com, Netherlands

Bio

Brendan Bank (1969) has been Booking.com’s Chief Technology Officer since August 2013. In his role as CTO, Brendan focuses on the scalability and development of the core infrastructure at Booking.com. He oversees a dynamic and fast-growing staff of global professionals to help ensure that Booking.com remains one of the leading technology companies in the world. He is responsible for every aspect of information technology within Booking.com, from desktop support teams to front-end development and server farms.
Shortly after joining the company, Brendan created a unique software development and operations environment consisting of small, agile, multidisciplinary teams. These teams are made up of product owners, designers, developers, systems administrators, DBAs, statisticians and data scientists who are constantly looking for ways of improving the company’s infrastructure to better convert website visitors to customers. This way of working fosters craftsmanship, good communication and entrepreneurship - and forms the core of Booking.com’s innovation engine.
Before coming to Booking.com in 2008, Brendan spent four years consulting in Internet/eCommerce projects and helping companies with their Software Development methodology.
Earlier in his career, Brendan worked as the Server and Services Director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at MCI WorldCom and the Manager of Network Operations for the Dutch part of the network with UUNet. He also spent time as a product development engineer with NLnet, the first Internet Service provider in the Netherlands. He started his career as a systems administrator.

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Surviving in an increasingly computerized and software driven automotive industry

Wednesday, 13:30 to 14:30

The automotive industry, and the car, is in for an exciting ride over the next decade. Electronics and software are the battle fields for innovation, and only players who master those areas can survive the turmoil. New players with a background in computer systems and software have clear advantages in that respect. Incumbents (all of us with a history in a more traditional mechanical background), need to quickly adapt and learn to successfully compete with those new players.
The way we see it, two major transformations are imperative for our long-term survival: 1) adopting an in-vehicle electronic system that is based on an integrated computing platform (a “computer-on-wheels”) with mechatronic capabilities and 2) becoming an efficient and agile developer of high-quality software. The way we approach our software architecture will be key to succeeding in these transformations.

Martin Hiller
Technical Leader in Software Architecture

Volvo Cars Corporation, Sweden

Bio

Martin Hiller is Technical Leader in Logical Design Elements and Software Architecture at Volvo Cars, Gothenburg, Sweden. Before joining Volvo Cars in 2015, he worked in the Flight Software section at ESA's technological heart, ETSEC, in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, coordinating ESA's efforts to introduce IMA (Integrated Modular Avionics) principles from the aeronautical domain to the space domain. Prior to ESA, he worked at Volvo Technology, a research and advanced engineering unit within the Volvo Group now known as Advanced Technology & Research, focusing on dependable embedded systems, AUTOSAR, and automotive electronic architectures.
Martin has worked in the area of embedded distributed systems & software for over 20 years and received a MSc degree in Computer Science & Engineering in 1996, and a PhD in Computer Engineering in 2002, both from Chalmers University of Technology.
Martin is currently working with future generations of the automotive electronic architecture at Volvo Cars. The future of the automobile and the automotive industry is moving towards more integrated computerisation, autonomy, and interconnection across vehicles, infrastructure and cloud. Martin does what he can to ensure that Volvo Cars is prepared for this transformation.

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Accelerating Change

Thursday, 09:00 to 10:00

The world around us is changing rapidly and has become much harder to predict. Having the right balance between traditional and more modern approaches becomes key, e.g. discipline vs. agility, up-front planning vs. more continuous approaches, and centralized vs. decentralized decision making. It is increasingly essential to enable the benefits of speed and flexibility while continuously delivering customer value and do so without compromises on quality. This keynote focuses on multiple topics, including software architecture and the right mindset, that enable us to accelerate change in our systems to keep pace in today’s dynamically changing and software-driven world. In particular they allow for a more “continuous” approach, in both development and operations (DevOps), in a broad range of industrial domains.

Frances Paulisch
Senior Principal Key Expert for Software and Digitalization

Siemens AG, Germany

Bio

Frances Paulisch is a senior principal key expert for software and digitalization at Siemens Corporate Technology. She drives cross-company activities that help address rapidly changing markets and the shift towards digitalization. A main focus of her work is empowering cross-functional teams to work together well over the whole development lifecycle to achieve speed and flexibility while ensuring quality.  This is done through systematic best practice sharing on a broad range of topics. This includes a strong focus on rapid continuous software engineering and on the associated culture change.

She has driven the development of a role-based architecture qualification programs which are established as global core learning programs at Siemens. Frances is also active member of the global software engineering community, playing an active role in various major software conferences such as the International Conference on Software Engineering and has served as the Chair of the Advisory Board of the IEEE Software magazine.

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Android Security from a Software Architectural Perspective

Friday, 09:00 to 10:00

Extensive support for architecture-based software development in Android has played a key role in its success as the dominant mobile platform. Architectural constructs, such as reusable software components and domain-specific architectural styles, provisioned by the Android development framework, have dramatically improved app developer productivity, enabled the platform to overcome resource constraints, and generally contributed to the realization of a vibrant app ecosystem. In parallel with Android’s meteoric rise in popularity, however, we have been witnessing an alarming escalation in the number and sophistication of the security threats targeted at Android. In this talk, I will demonstrate how misconceived architectural principles are the root cause of a broad set of security vulnerabilities in Android. I will then describe a variety of techniques developed over the past few years to mitigate these issues. Finally, I will conclude the talk with an overview of the lessons learned and the opportunities for future research.

Sam Malek
Associate Professor

University of California, USA

Bio

Sam Malek is an Associate Professor in the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is also a member of the Institute for Software Research and the director of Software Engineering and Analysis Laboratory at UCI. Malek's general research interests are in the field of software engineering, and to date his focus has spanned the areas of software architecture, mobile computing, program analysis and testing, and software dependability and security. Malek received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and his B.S. degree in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. He is recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award, GMU Emerging Researcher/Scholar/Creator award, and GMU Computer Science Department Outstanding Faculty Research Award. Malek is on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and the Springer Journal of Computing.

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