1.
What’s it all mean?<br />Application Engineer<br />

2.
Axiom<br />Applications are not just code<br />Containers and application servers play increasingly bigger roles<br />Increasing computational demands drive horizontal scaling. With great power comes great responsibility:<br />Monitoring (system health);<br />Infrastructure (hardware, network, OS setup);<br />Administration (automated deployment, rolling updates)<br />

3.
Axiom cont.<br />Increasing application complexity creates new challenges for IT staff:<br />Applicative monitoring (queue sizes, component statistics, complex behavioral rules)<br />System tuning (horizontal scaling + application performance improvements = huge gains)<br />System architecture (static server farms, load balancers, high availability, central storage…) <br />Not just LAMP anymore!<br />

4.
Axiom cont.<br />As IT staff plays an increasingly significant role, responsibilities shift from R&D to IT<br />… but IT can’t deliver without being directly involved with R&D!<br />System architecture is tightly coupled with deployment, monitoring, tuning<br />System architecture may comprise shared responsibilities (e.g. a hybrid static/dynamic web farm)<br />Inevitable conclusion: A successful project requires close cooperation between R&D and IT<br />

5.
The Application Engineer…<br />… is the IT liaison officer in R&D<br />Specifies operational requirements (e.g. monitoring, configuration, logging);<br />Active participant in design reviews;<br />Is the contact point for R&D requirements from IT (hardware, deployment, storage…)<br />

6.
The Application Engineer…<br />… is the IT equivalent of a system architect<br />Specifies architecture (web farms, central/distributed storage, load balancing…)<br />Works closely with R&D to define the system architecture<br />Has significant theoretical knowledge of the application<br />(… in order to correctly monitor and tune it)<br />

7.
The Application Engineer…<br />… is directly responsible for the production environment<br />Monitoring (specification and implementation)<br />Reporting (provides feedback to R&D)<br />Ongoing tuning<br />Management contact point<br />

8.
In Practical Terms<br />Vís a vís R&D:<br />Sits in on design reviews<br />Generates requirements<br />Provides ongoing feedback to R&D<br />Production errors<br />Performance bottlenecks<br />Collaborates with R&D to define the system architecture and deployment practices<br />

9.
In Practical Terms<br />Vís a vís management:<br />Provides the contact point for the production environment (“the site is down!”)<br />Responsibilities include:<br />Deployment<br />Production uptime<br />System performance<br />Support (?) and issue tracking<br />Infrastructure (web, high availability, central storage…)<br />

10.
Are we done yet?<br />Questions?<br />Comments?<br />Snarky remarks?<br />

11.
Final words<br />