Guest lecture by Saksham Gautam from Netlight will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Cloud 101 – Building a scalable Data Platform — Lessons learned from examples in the wild” and it will take place in room 1055N at 4PM on June 9, 2022.

Abstract

Cloud computing has been a major enabler for small businesses and large enterprises alike when building production-grade large scale applications even with a small team.

It has enabled companies to divert focus from repetitive infrastructural tasks and undifferentiated heavy lifting to developing business-oriented use cases.

Saksham has been working with cloud services for over 14 years. He works as a Consultant at Netlight where he helps move applications and organizations to the cloud. He recently supported the cloud transformation of one of the largest Swiss media companies and will be presenting this case as a concrete example for the reasonings and lessons learned when building such a platform in the cloud.

During this lecture, we will start with the basics on the core components and fundamental building blocks offered by three of the most popular public cloud providers, namely Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

We will discuss the deployment setup with CI/CD pipelines, network layout and overall architecture around serverless and micro-service-based principles, Lambda architecture, polyglot persistence and the data-mesh pattern.

We will be exploring various components of the platform in detail, including the user activity tracking service, user segment and interest profile builder for serving advertisements, and the recommendation engine and how their needs are addressed in the platform.

We will further be discussing the limitations of the pay-per-use model along-side techniques for monitoring and troubleshooting such a distributed and diverse system.

Finally, we will take a look at the bigger picture and share lessons learned from various other cloud platform projects.