Open Tech Calendar

We promised there was something in the works - and it should be a good one!

First of all I'd like to say a MASSIVE thanks to the wonderful people at Zoo Digital for not only hosting the event, but splashing out on some pizzas too!

This month we're joining up with Sheffield Devops for some Testy-Devops crossover talks. Hopefully they're of interest to both crowds! As well as a new location, we're starting a little bit earlier than usual. So make sure you're there before the pizza runs out!

Doors open from 6pm. We'll try to kick the talks off around 6:30. Tickets are available both here and on Shef Devops page - but there's no need to sign up on both.

First up we've got Bernard Jauregui from BJSS with How I learned to stop worrying and love the Cloud

The Cloud is great for running test automation and non-functional tests, but it also hides pitfalls and weird side effects.

This talk is about my time as a test lead, using AWS and Azure for large scale performance testing. It covers five areas of concern and confusion, that most testers will encounter. I’ll cover the challenges faced and how to overcome them.

Attendees will learn how to avoid common mistakes and build better test environments.

Here are five things not to worry about:

1. Where to start
2. Runaway costs
3. Stepping on toes
4. Weird outcomes
5. Effective tear-down

And then we have Phil Garner and Claire Johnstone from SkyBet Sheffield with Performance Testing on Production... why the hell not?

At Sky Betting and Gaming we have many 24/7 products with 1.7 million active customers, and sometimes they all happen to be playing at the same time.

This means we have to cope with traffic loads of:

- 44+ million game transactions per week
- 50+ million content updates daily
- peaks of 23k+ logins per minute, 16k+ bets per minute and 1 million active customers

We have over 1,300 production servers across a private and AWS estate with a minimum of 6.8 THz of compute available at any one time for our customers to hammer.

Come and find out why and how we test our systems to cope with these traffic loads over the last 2 years, taking our platform from coping with 400 logins per second to the current 1.4k logins per second all the way to our next target of 2k logins per second. We will tell you how we do it and more importantly all the mistakes we have made along the way (well only some of them - we are not the only talk of the evening!).

And as always, if you'd like to sponsor, host or speak at a future event then please do get in touch! And don't forget to keep an eye on the @steelbugs twitter account for details of events and updates.

Hope to see you there next week.

Iain.