Alex Fernandez

Alex Fernandez is a Spanish software engineer with almost 20 years of experience. Currently working as a senior developer at MediaSmart, and sometimes as a freelance scalability consultant. Shameless tinkerer since forever, he was seduced by Node.js a couple of years ago, and now eats thousands of requests per second for breakfast.

JavaScript has long reigned in the frontend, and has in the past few years taken the backend by assult. And yet we have conceded the DevOps space for too long to other languages: Java (Ant, Jenkins), Ruby (Puppet, Chef), Python (Ansible, Fabric), and now Go (Docker or Kubernetes). Luckily some Node.js packages have started to get traction: StriderCD or ShipIt are bright examples. It is high time we launched a full-scale conquest of DevOps development.

In this talk we will speak about our real-world experience at MediaSmart Mobile using Node.js for DevOps tasks. For a few years now we have used it to create our own DevOps tools: Node.js code monitors our platforms, orchestrates tens of servers, deploys continuously about ten differen t repositories, and automates much of our infrastructure. It has helped us create a traffic balancer that can handle upwards of 300 thousand re quests per second. Recently we have started migrating our continuous deployment from a basic package called ‘deployment’ to StriderCD, with nic e results; and have started automating tasks with ShipIt.

We will also explore the limits of JavaScript and Node.js, and where we have needed other languages and platforms.