Modeling Your Applications Based on Airport Operations: Yes, Even the TSA Part

How can we take the experience of standing in line at the airport and use it as an example in building scalable, distributed applications?

Originally presented at CodeMash 2015

If you’ve only spent a small amount of time in an airport, then you may have missed the tight orchestration it takes to get you – and your bags – from Point A to Point B. You seem to go from one line to the next – waiting for your turn to be processed. Getting your boarding pass in one line, x-rayed in another, snacks in another.

Each line you stand in is completely unrelated to all the other lines, yet, they each play an important role in the overall process of getting you to your destination. Building scalable, distributed applications has many of those same characteristics. Seemingly disjointed, independent processes that work together to perform a larger function.

This presentation focuses on the design characteristics of this approach and includes some real-world examples using Golang, Docker & RabbitMQ – though this technique is tool agnostic.

Modeling Your Applications Based on Airport Operations from Centric Consulting