Speaker
Abstract
These days it is possible to achieve fairly good performance on cloud provisioned systems. We discuss the design of a high performance, strongly consistent system which maintains constant service in the face of regular updates to core logic.
Interview
Due to unique performance and consistency requirements, financial exchanges have traditionally pushed the boundaries of what’s possible on backend services. We can now do a similar exercise on cloud workloads and provide some counterintuitive anecdata to common wisdom about scaling.
If some folks designing distributed systems gain some conviction to try to do more transactions with less complexity, we will have seen critical impact.
Standard patterns in scaling distributed systems in the cloud can lead to proliferation of provisioned resources and an overwhelming cross product of interactions between different systems and tools. There are circumstances where addition by subtraction can be uniquely impactful.
Something deterministic would be wonderful.
QCon has had plenty of impact on the landscape of Software Developers in the Bay. There are talks that have created massive movements, leaving a sprawling wake of refactored and scaled systems across the industry.
Database people give excellent talks, I learned about fsyncgate, mediocre client-server protocols, and streaming magic all at QCon. The rigorous tracks are properly rigorous here at QCon.
Topics
QCon San Francisco 2025 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
Part of the track
Architectures You've Always Wondered About Hosted by Khawaja Shams Co-Founder & CEO @Momento, previously @NASA and @AmazonFrom the same track
Monday 17 November
10:35 Ballroom A Session Architecture How to Build an Exchange Frank Yu Director of Engineering @Coinbase, Previously Principal Engineer and Director @FairX These days it is possible to achieve fairly good performance on cloud provisioned systems. We discuss the design of a high performance, strongly consistent system which maintains constant service in the face of regular updates to core logic. 11:45 Ballroom A Session Durability Compiling Workflows into Databases: The Architecture That Shouldn't Work (But Does) Jeremy Edberg, Qian Li What if everything you know about building distributed systems is backwards? 13:35 Pacific DEKJ Session Architecture Parting the Clouds: The Rise of Disaggregated Systems Murat Demirbas Principal Research Scientist @MongoDB Research, Previously Principal Applied Scientist @AWS and a Professor of Computer Science at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) Cloud systems are undergoing an architectural shift. Traditional shared-nothing designs struggle to deliver the elasticity, availability, and operational simplicity that the cloud demands. 14:45 Ballroom A Session Platform Engineering Building Resilient Platforms: Insights from 20+ Years in Mission-Critical Infrastructure Matthew Liste Head of Infrastructure @American Express, Previously @JPMorgan Chase and @Goldman Sachs In this talk, Matthew will describe lessons learned from over 20+ years of building scalable, secure and stable infrastructure platforms for software in financial services (electronic trading, credit card processing etc.), the talk is relevant to anyone building platforms for… 15:55 Ballroom A Session Architecture Architecting a Centralized Platform for Data Deletion at Netflix Vidhya Arvind, Shawn Liu What does it take to safely delete data at Netflix scale? In large-scale systems, data deletion cuts across infrastructure, reliability, and performance complexities. 17:05 Seacliff D Unconference Unconference: Architectures You've Always Wondered About