Build multi-region services they said, it will be fun they said... and it was!

For many, building a globally distributed infrastructure would be a long and complicated project, with the need to order tons of hardware, with hours of configuration, and a large upfront cost. For Metapackers, the approach of treating infrastructure as code and using cloud first technologies made the journey to accelerate our retail platforms into the US Market an exciting adventure.

When we were acquired by ‪Stamps.com, the second fastest growing US tech company, we were faced with an overnight opportunity: to leverage the cloud and open source tools to expand into a new region on a short timescale.

This talk will give an overview of the technologies we used (Packer, Ansible, Terraform), challenges and decisions we faced and the new operational concerns that multi region brings. We will also explore how to deploy across regions with our Cloudbees EKS cluster (AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service).

Come and learn how the previous focus on infrastructure as code and immutable infrastructure made it possible to achieve this demanding task with an aggressive timeline.

About speaker

Natalie took her first foray into the world of programming as part of her physics degree and has been passionate about IT ever since. She has worked in a range of software engineering positions in the global entertainment, media, retail industries. She now heads up the UK Platform Engineering team at Metapack.

Outside of work she enjoys travelling and cooking. She speaks the following languages:

1. English, Spanish: fluent
2. French, Mandarin: conversational
3. Polish: starting Monday ;)

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