Keynotes

Prof. Samir Tata (LinkedIn, USA)

Biography:

Samir Tata is a Senior Manager at LinkedIn, overseeing teams responsible for the maintenance services of all LinkedIn data centers. Before joining LinkedIn, he managed the Cloud Services team at LG Electronics and served as a Research Staff Member at IBM Research, focusing on IoT and Cloud Computing. Earlier in his career, Samir was a full professor at Telecom SudParis, where he led a research in Service Computing, Cloud Computing, BPM, and IoT. Samir published over 150 papers and 20 US patents.

Title:

Infrastructure as a Service at Scale: The Journey to Zero-Toil Maintenance at LinkedIn

Summary:

In this presentation, we will explore LinkedIn's journey towards transforming its compute infrastructure through the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) initiative. This effort aims to manage the vast scale of LinkedIn’s fleet while minimizing human toil, focusing on efficiency, reliability, and automation.

We will dive into the challenges faced when maintaining a fleet of this size and how manual intervention became a bottleneck for scalability and operational excellence. To address this, we embarked on a comprehensive automation strategy that allows our maintenance operations to run autonomously, significantly reducing the need for human oversight. The presentation will showcase:

  • Key milestones in rebuilding LinkedIn’s compute infrastructure.
  • How automation has been integrated into daily fleet operations to achieve zero-toil maintenance.
  • Techniques we used to ensure that these operations run without impacting service availability or putting additional pressure on service teams.
  • The journey of scaling IaaS with a focus on reliable, self-healing systems.
  • Lessons learned and best practices for implementing automated maintenance in large-scale environments.

By the end of the presentation, attendees will gain insights into how LinkedIn is successfully transitioning to a more resilient and efficient infrastructure, allowing us to manage our global fleet with minimal to zero human intervention.