April 19, 2022 by Alexander Martinez

Maintaining data infrastructure at scale requires technologies that eventually need to be improved and/or upgraded at some point in time. This can be due to new version releases of open-source or licensed software, and compatibility/security considerations. When these situations arise, it’s necessary to address them through the following processes: roll-out, testing, and validation. This encompasses acceptance, integration, and unit tests to verify the interaction at different levels of code for the service being added or changed, as well as validating systems on individual hosts that would be impacted and non-production environments for further validation. It’s especially important because the consequences of not taking these steps can cause an outage of access for users or developers, or result in possible data loss. This discussion will go over best practices and lessons learned about planning roll-out and testing plans and their considerations, in addition to monitoring active deployments and responding to the unexpected in these scenarios.

Speaker: Alexander Martinez

Alexander joined Yelp’s Data Infrastructure Organization two and a half years ago originally as a member of the stream processing team, and later became a member of the DRE-SQL team in July 2020. During his time at Yelp, Alexander has been both a project lead and member on various initiatives including: upgrading a MySQL major version, deploying and integrating Vitess, and creating automation and monitoring for various related technologies. Prior to Yelp, he studied mathematics at the University of British Columbia and worked on researching and developing computer vision and machine learning infrastructure while working at a startup in Vancouver, BC. When he’s not behind a monitor, Alexander can be found exploring as much of New York City as possible since his recent move to the city in October 2021.

Moderator: Trishia Ramos

Trishia has been a Technical Recruiting Coordinator on Yelp's Tech Talent team for almost one year. Prior to joining the tech field, she worked in healthcare while finishing her degree in Psychology at York University, and Human Resource Management at Ryerson University. Trishia finds excitement in meeting new people and learning about their experiences. She is committed to creating meaningful spaces for others to have their voices heard. Outside of work, she loves trying new foods, travelling and going on adventures with her dog!

About Yelping From Home:

Yelp’s mission is to connect people with great local businesses, and two of the teams working behind the scenes to make that happen are our five star engineering and product teams.

Playing an active role in our community is a value that we have strongly prioritized over the years. Typically we would invite you to come to Yelp’s HQ to network, grab a slice of ‘za, and learn about the technology and culture behind Yelp. With stay-at-home orders across the globe, Yelp (like many of you) has had no choice but to adapt to these changes. We understand that this is a strange and challenging time for many, so we’d like to invite you to join us as we navigate this new normal for the tech community together.

To stay connected, create space for folks to collaborate and share some of the things Yelp has been working on, we are launching our very own virtual tech talk series. This series of talks will feature Yelp employees from engineering and product share their stories about career development, technical skills and workplace challenges in a well-distributed environment.