scale.bythebay.io: Tim Perrett, Nelson: Rigorous Deployment for a Functional World

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Scale By the Bay 2019 is held on November 13-15 in sunny Oakland, California, on the shores of Lake Merritt: https://scale.bythebay.io. Join us! ----- Functional programming finds its roots in mathematics - the pursuit of purity and completeness. We functional programmers look to formalize system behaviors in an algebraic and total manner. Despite this, when it comes time to deploy ones beautiful monadic ivory towers to production, most organizations cast caution to the wind and use a myriad of bash scripts and sticky tape to get the job done. In this talk, the speaker will introduce you to Nelson, an open-source project from Verizon that looks to provide rigor to your large distributed system, whilst offering best-in-class security, runtime traffic shifting and a fully immutable approach to application lifecycle. Nelson itself is entirely composed of free algebras and coproducts, and the speaker will show not only how this has enabled development, but also how it provided a frame with which to reason about solutions to fundamental operational problems. Tim Perrett Head of Infrastructure Engineering, Verizon Avid functional programmer, experienced distributed systems engineer and published author. Primarily interested in schedulers, datacenter design, low-latency data access and the application of functional paradigms in large enterprise applications.

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