The modern service-oriented architecture is a rat's nest of incidental complexity. Truly understanding what's running in production is a massive task, made more complex by heterogeneous runtimes, frameworks, and idioms.

In this talk I explore the problem space of mapping process-to-process communication in a large network. I enumerate the options we've explored, focusing on their costs and benefits. Finally I present Cello, a tool that I've developed over the past 18 months which deduces a service topology as a directed graph.

Peter Bourgon is a distributed systems engineer who has seen things. He's currently working on the infrastructure that powers SoundCloud, the web's biggest audio platform.