You Should Be Building on Object Storage

QCon San Francisco 2026

Session Databases

You Should Be Building on Object Storage

Tuesday Nov 17 / 11:45AM PST (50 minutes), Ballroom BC at Hyatt Regency, San Francisco

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$3,250, Conference (3 days)
Current pricing ends November 20th

Abstract

Your data infrastructure can be made cheaper, more reliable and flexible by leveraging object storage as the foundational storage layer:

  • The economics are unbeatable, with storage priced at a fraction of NVMe/EBS and inter-AZ data transfers are free
  • Replication and 99.999999999% durability come with the package, obviating the need to think about some of distributed systems' hardest problems
  • There are numerous other benefits from security to disaster recovery that you can leverage.

Despite these benefits, 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 frameworks for understanding those limitations, practical tips for building on object storage, and a couple case studies on how we scaled online systems built on object storage.
 

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$3,250, Conference (3 days). Current pricing ends November 20th. All pass options.

76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

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

10:35 Ballroom BC Session Data Platforms Orderly Keys, Wild Values: Adaptive Compression for Distributed Key-Value Storage Joseph Lynch, Ayushi Singh 11:45 Ballroom BC Session Databases You Should Be Building on Object Storage Almog Gavra Member of Technical Staff @Databricks, Previously @Confluent and @LinkedIn 13:35 Ballroom BC Session Autoscaling 800 Valkey Clusters: Distributed Systems Lessons from Scaling Stateful Fleets Kishor Yadav Kommanaboina Staff Software Engineer @Snapchat - Leading Caching and Storage Infrastructure 14:45 Seacliff D Unconference Unconference: Distributed Systems in Production 15:55 Ballroom BC Session Distributed Systems When Your Users Are Agents: Lessons from a Distributed Postgres Platform Gwen Shapira Co-Founder and CPO @Nile, Previously Engineering Leader @Confluent, PMC Member @Kafka, & Committer Apache Sqoop 17:05 Ballroom BC Session Adaptive Systems in Production: What Recommendation Systems Can Teach Us About Agents Mallika Rao Senior Engineering Manager @Zocdoc, Previously @Netflix, @Twitter and @Walmart

Current pricing ends November 20th
$3,250, Conference (3 days)

Register