Application Engineer: Introductory Presentation

What’s it all mean?
Application Engineer

Axiom
Applications are not just code
Containers and application servers play increasingly bigger roles
Increasing computational demands drive horizontal scaling. With great power comes great responsibility:
Monitoring (system health);
Infrastructure (hardware, network, OS setup);
Administration (automated deployment, rolling updates)

Axiom cont.
Increasing application complexity creates new challenges for IT staff:
Applicative monitoring (queue sizes, component statistics, complex behavioral rules)
System tuning (horizontal scaling + application performance improvements = huge gains)
System architecture (static server farms, load balancers, high availability, central storage…)
Not just LAMP anymore!

Axiom cont.
As IT staff plays an increasingly significant role, responsibilities shift from R&D to IT
… but IT can’t deliver without being directly involved with R&D!
System architecture is tightly coupled with deployment, monitoring, tuning
System architecture may comprise shared responsibilities (e.g. a hybrid static/dynamic web farm)
Inevitable conclusion: A successful project requires close cooperation between R&D and IT

The Application Engineer…
… is the IT liaison officer in R&D
Specifies operational requirements (e.g. monitoring, configuration, logging);
Active participant in design reviews;
Is the contact point for R&D requirements from IT (hardware, deployment, storage…)

… is the IT equivalent of a system architect
Specifies architecture (web farms, central/distributed storage, load balancing…)
Works closely with R&D to define the system architecture
Has significant theoretical knowledge of the application
(… in order to correctly monitor and tune it)

… is directly responsible for the production environment
Monitoring (specification and implementation)
Reporting (provides feedback to R&D)
Ongoing tuning
Management contact point

In Practical Terms
Vís a vís R&D:
Sits in on design reviews
Generates requirements
Provides ongoing feedback to R&D
Production errors
Performance bottlenecks
Collaborates with R&D to define the system architecture and deployment practices

In Practical Terms
Vís a vís management:
Provides the contact point for the production environment (“the site is down!”)
Responsibilities include:
Deployment
Production uptime
System performance
Support (?) and issue tracking
Infrastructure (web, high availability, central storage…)

Are we done yet?
Questions?
Comments?
Snarky remarks?

Final words

http://www.tomergabel.com	1912
http://tomergabel.com	65
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	10
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com	4
http://cache.baidu.com	1
http://www.rxx.co.il	1
http://translate.yandex.net	1

Application Engineer: Introductory Presentation

by Tomer Gabel on Dec 13, 2009

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

7 Embeds 1,994

Statistics

Application Engineer: Introductory Presentation — Presentation Transcript