How Elevate Will Drive Continuing Professional Education

The importance of continuing professional education, particularly in a field as innovative and rapidly-changing as digital experience monitoring, cannot be understated. Performance monitoring is constantly adapting to accommodate the ever-changing IT landscape, and staying ahead of the curve when it comes to learning the best tools and strategies is vital for any company that seeks to provide the best possible experiences for their customers and users.

That’s why we’ve tailored Elevate, our inaugural conference, around the topics and presentations that our customers want to learn about. As the only tech conference dedicated to digital experience monitoring, Elevate will feature innovative, relevant education sessions taught by performance experts from some of the most ground-breaking companies in the world.

The complete Elevate agenda features 27 breakout sessions along three different tracks:

• From Firefighting to Fire Prevention – a use case-driven track designed to showcase the latest proactive monitoring techniques used by DevOps firefighters in the trenches
• Exploring and Managing the New IT Ecosystem – a look at all the different tools and components that go into delivering great digital experiences, and how to scale them for future growth
• The IT-Customer Experience Relationship – a business-focused track that show how IT is now a driver for customer experience, and how it affects a company’s all-important bottom line

Let’s take a look at a sample breakout session from each of these tracks (and as presented by each of our Gold Sponsors) to give you a better idea of how they will be presented at the conference.

From Firefighting to Fire Prevention

Hiding Behind the CDN: Multi-Layer Security Filtering Inside Edgecast – Tin Zaw, Verizon DMS

Today’s web properties face security challenges all the time. Volumetric DDoS attacks are a question of when. Application level attacks like SQL injections, remote file access, Shell Shock, and framework exploitation are still targeted at websites, even when they are not susceptible to them. Legitimate features such as login page and shopping carts are regularly abused by dedicated, malicious bots.

As CDNs are designed to be scalable, distributed and high performing, as well as that they are the first intelligent touch point that an HTTP client interacts with, they present a natural place to house layers of defense mechanisms. This talk will cover how Verizon’s Edgecast CDN implements these defense mechanisms in layers as well as challenges and solutions in implementing them without sacrificing performance in a multi-tenant environment.

The takeaways from this talk are twofold. First is to learn how web property owners can interact with CDN providers in securing their properties in a layered fashion. Second is to share technologies and approaches – many of the open source – that VDMS has used so that infrastructure, cloud, and datacenter operators can apply them to their environments. The ultimate hope, however, is to foster intelligence and information sharing among stakeholders who are on the receiving end of these attacks.

Exploring and Managing the New IT Ecosystem

Why You Should Expect More from Your CDN – Hooman Behesti, Fastly

CDNs have become core to our application infrastructures, both for performance and offload, to the point where building an application without a CDN is almost irresponsible! However, the days where CDNs were opaque black box services used for caching and traffic redirection are behind us. Today, we should expect more from these services, not only for caching, but also in terms of control and visibility.

In this talk, Hooman will discuss new ways of using CDNs, leveraging the power of the distributed platforms they offer your applications. Specifically, he’ll dive into the core features you should expect from modern CDNs and how those features can help extend your applications to the edge of the network, closer to your users. Using real-world examples, he’ll illustrate how these services can act as powerful platforms on which to build your applications, rather than just a means to deliver your content.

The IT-Customer Experience Relationship

Simplifying Markup to Improve User Experience – Estelle Weyl, Instart Logic

A well-coded website is fast, search engine-friendly, and accessible to all, no matter the device or disability. All these factors improve findability, user experience and conversion rates. While the latest and greatest JS or CSS features can make development fast and fun, they can also lead to poorly performing, inaccessible bloat.

Semantic markup helps ensure accessibility while reducing the need for frameworks. When developers write semantic HTML and leverage the power of CSS, they can reduce CSS and JS by up to 95% — all while creating content that is fully accessible. While using frameworks can be fun (and beneficial to a developer’s LinkedIn profile), and relying on libraries can seemingly reduce development time, allowing 3rd-party scripts to generate markup usually adds bloat while ignoring or even destroying accessibility. By developing with web standards, you can create accessible, performant web sites that keep your users happy.

In this talk, Estelle will take a look at a case study, and how converting a single-page app developed with 40+ dependencies (don’t ask!) and 100+ accessibility bugs in the queue to simple semantic HTML and CSS, with a few hundred lines of JavaScript, reduced the site size by 90%, obliterated all the accessibility bugs, and simplified site maintenance and new feature development.

Click here to learn more about the different topics that will be covered at Catchpoint Elevate and to reserve your spot today.