Join us for the first group meeting of the year, just ahead of Elastic{ON} 17.  We will be discussing the successes and failures of Realself's journey with the ELastic stack, focusing on the variety of applications deployed in different areas of the business.  Realself team of engineers and devops will discuss technical challenges from scaling, monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, configuring and maintaining multiple clusters in AWS, as well as building a wide variety of applications from traditional search and recommendations to content ranking, image classification and SEO tools in a high traffic, community based business that relies on customer trust and content discovery.

Hope to see you all soon !

The Agenda

• 6:15 - 6:30pm: Catch a brew, local cider or other refreshments, eat some food and network.

• 6:30pm - 8:00pm: Find out how Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana can power your business in unusual ways, and learn about some challenges and success stories in technical presentations from the Realself engineering team.

• 8:00pm - we get kicked out: Chat with Elastic team members and other like-minded Elastic users about your interest and experiences, network and meet peers that will be around the Bay Area for the official Elastic{ON} 17 conference.

Proposed Talks

"Empowering users on life-changing transformations" - Realself Engineering team

Going through the pains of growing a startup using a limited budget and having great ambitions, find out how Elasticsearch can be integral part of multiple business areas and grow with your company by powering content discovery, feeds, search, recommendations, content ranking and more.  We will talk about our challenges, migrations over the years and unusual applications where we leveraged Elasticsearch to aggregate value to our data.

"Configuring, Deploying, Monitoring and Maintaining multiple clusters"  - Ed Anderson, Sr. DevOps

Sharing experiences on different success and failure stories of building, monitoring, scaling and maintaining ES clusters on AWS, from the devops universe perspective.  We will discuss tools, techniques and challenges while diving into solutions and decisions to deliver a scalable Elastic operation that will serve different needs.

"Informal Q&A session with members from the Elastic team" - TBD

We will have some Elastic members and trainers in town during the week so we are not scheduling anything official yet.  They will be leading training classes through the whole day, so this should be at most an informal Q&A or open discussion segment, being respectful of their time and eventual participation.

Venue

The meetup will take place at Realself's new corporate office on 83 S. King St, 8th floor.  This is the Capital One building on the corner of 1st Ave S and S King St, in the heart of Pioneer Square (entrance through S. King St), steps away from CenturyLink Field and the International District station/bus tunnel - so it is a quick walk from the East side commuters.  

For parking: the building has a garage (entrance on the back, Railroad/Alaskan side) that CLOSES AT 9PM.  There is usually plenty of street parking on first Avenue after 5PM, and around the surrounding blocks. I will confirm with the garage if that is an option and update everybody properly.