Speaker
Abstract
“Diskless” systems that delegate durability to object storage are everywhere, and for three good reasons:
- The economics are unbeatable: storage is priced at a fraction of block storage or NVMe, and inter-AZ data-transfers are free.
- Object storage handles replication and provides 99.999999999% durability, solving distributed systems’ hardest problem.
- There are hundreds of competent engineers dedicated to keeping it highly available.
But object storage was built for throughput and offline data processing, not for the access patterns of online systems. Building on it means confronting high per-request latency, managing immutability and navigating per-request API costs.
This talk covers the necessary mental models for working around those limitations and how we applied them to build SlateDB, an OSS object-native LSM engine. We’ll discuss how to effectively batch and buffer writes, strategies for caching to speed up reads and the protocols for building correct systems.
You'll leave with a practical framework for deciding whether object storage is the right durability layer for you, and how to design around its limits.
$2,835, Conference (3 days). Current pricing ends September 8th. All pass options.
QCon San Francisco 2026 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.
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Tuesday 17 November
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