A Year with Apache Aurora - Lessons from Chartbeat's Migration

Explore the journey of Chartbeat's migration to Apache Aurora in this 42-minute conference talk. Gain insights into the decision-making process, implementation strategies, and lessons learned as Rick Mangi, Head of Platform Engineering and DevOps at Chartbeat, shares their experience transitioning from puppet-managed AWS EC2 instances to Aurora. Discover the motivations behind the migration, including cost savings, deployment consistency, and improved resource utilization. Learn about the challenges faced, the workloads that were deemed unsuitable for Aurora, and how this transition helped streamline development workflows and manage server sprawl. Delve into Chartbeat's approach to software engineering, the reasons for choosing Mesa, and the intricacies of the Aurora workflow. Explore topics such as Pants, Templates, Routing, and the consolidation process. Gain valuable knowledge from a 20-year industry veteran's perspective on bringing a successful startup to the next level of efficiency and reliability using Apache Aurora, Kafka, and AWS technologies.

Introduction
Our approach to software engineering
Why Mesa
What is Aurora
Big Decision Time
Aurora Workflow
Pants
Templates
Routing
Consolidate
Flume Athena