Scale Summit is the new Scale Camp, an unconference aimed at bringing the same kind of topics as you might expect at Velocity.

This was the first Scale Summit, the venue was excellent as was the food (especially the bacon rolls, from Eden apparently) and supply of drink. Scale Summit happens under Chatham House rules so there’s no attribution of what is said which allows the attendees to be really frank and also for people to be free with what they really know rather than hedging and trying to be “on message”. It makes for a fascinating gathering.

The sessions varied in their organisation but all focussed on discussion between the participants. I managed to go to the Elasticsearch session, which was interesting for the practical boundaries that people were finding and also the operational knowledge. On the subject of using ES as the primary application store, the feeling seemed to be “not yet”, but there was also some words of wisdom about separating out document stores and search functionality and not finding a superficial unity in the two purposes.

The microservices session was a fast and furious fishbowl, easily the liveliest event and one that is going to require a post in its own right. It was interesting to see that the room split into practitioners and people who were sceptical that microservices were a thing or held value over conventional service development.

After lunch I sat in on what can be done to get frontend testing off the critical path to production (not much now but clearly more effort needs to be made), distributed DOS attacks on transactional sites (not as scary as I imagined but again we have to be thinking about how this works), distributed data stores (good war stories, felt better informed for going), getting ops and developers to work together and Linux containers (definitely going to try Docker now).

I had quite a few questions going into the event and while I didn’t get all the answers I hoped for I did at least establish that smart people don’t have simple answers to them either which is reassuring. It’s hard to tell in the heat of it all whether you’re on the edge of things doing things that are pushing the boundaries or simply over-complicating your situation.

The attendees were nicely mixed and from a range of backgrounds, ops, architecture and developers were all well-represented so you felt you were seeing a rounded situation.

The unconference format left me wanting more rather than feeling I had had enough. The openess was amazing and I am planning on being there next year.