Atlassian Engineer's 8-Year Journey: Building Load Balancing and Beyond

Summary

After being laid off from Atlassian, an engineer reflects on eight years of building significant technical systems, starting with an open service broker for self-service load balancer provisioning. This system, initially built with Flask and later Fast API, handled resource provisioning asynchronously via SQS and DynamoDB. A major project involved replacing enterprise load balancers with Envoy proxy, managed by a custom control plane called Sovereign. Sovereign used Fast API, templates, and dynamic context from databases and S3 to configure Envoy proxies. The infrastructure was deployed using CloudFormation templates referencing AMIs built with HashiCorp Packer and Salt Stack, capable of provisioning thousands of proxies across multiple regions. The platform was crucial in migrating major Atlassian products like Jira and Confluence to a centralized, secure load balancing system. The engineer also developed skills in diplomacy, conflict resolution, and mentoring, though found formal mentoring challenging. The platform's ultimate goal was to centralize common concerns like authentication, authorization, DDoS protection, and rate limiting at the edge, preventing duplication across numerous backend services.