Online Experimentation with Immutable Infrastructure

Immutable infrastructure has changed the way we think about system lifecycle: compute machines live for days instead of months or years, and applications live for hours or less. With the proliferation of CI/CD systems, and infrastructure as a service, the increased churn in production systems has hastened the immediate need for tools that prioritize experimentation - is your next development iteration really better than the last? In such a volatile world, traditional notions of compute “environments” and mutable approaches to experimentation can be found lacking. In large systems, emergent behaviors are near impossible to replicate in isolation, so experimenting in production systems is the only way to effectively measure hypothesis. This session covers different schemes for experimentation and the primitives required to make converged infrastructure work for real systems.