Relational Data at the Edge

QCon San Francisco 2023

Session Database

Relational Data at the Edge

Monday Oct 2 / 11:45AM PDT, Ballroom BC

Abstract

Data storage and access at the edge delivers massive performance gains by reducing location-sensitive latency. Cloudflare operates a distributed cross-region database architecture at the edge, serving over 50TB of online transactional data over millions of requests across our entire security and web performance product suite. Storing and managing relational data at the edge carries a unique set of challenges dictated by timeless CAP constraints and highly variable load conditions, requiring careful tradeoffs.

How can we minimize replication lag, choose replication strategies (asynchronous, streaming, logical, custom tooling) that balance consistency and performance, optimize request routing, and even speed up split brain cluster resynchronization? Achieving high availability storage performance at the edge demands innovative techniques involving custom performance optimizations across our anycast BGP network, cluster management layer, and down to the core Postgres recovery system.

So, you still want to build your database architecture at the edge?

You’ll learn about Cloudflare’s entire edge database architecture, unique challenges and practices for data replication, failover and recovery, and custom performance techniques. We'll also peek into the exciting future landscape of edge storage.

Interview

Building a managed Postgres environment at Cloudflare, working on building edge applications, and contributing to Postgres and related open-source projects.

To help everyone understand the challenges of data at the edge and what are the ways to solve them.

Someone who is a Systems Engineer, SRE or even a developer who is curious in understanding edge computing and how to enable it through Postgres.

I would expect attendees will learn something about the limitations/challenges of data at the edge, and opportunities if done right.

Topics

Database Edge Computing Cloud Computing Postgres SQLite Distributed Systems Architecture High Availability OLTP
76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

QCon San Francisco 2023 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.

Share

From the same track

Monday 2 October

10:35 Ballroom BC Session Serverless AWS Lambda Under the Hood Mike Danilov Senior Principal Engineer @AWS Lambda 11:45 Ballroom BC Session Database Relational Data at the Edge Justin Kwan, Vignesh Ravichandran 13:35 Ballroom BC Session K8s NIST 800-207A: Implementing Zero Trust Architecture Zack Butcher Founding Engineer @Tetrateio & NIST co-author on security, prev core services @GoogleCloud 14:45 Ballroom BC Session Distributed Systems Managing 238M Memberships at Netflix Surabhi Diwan Senior Software Engineer @Netflix 15:55 Seacliff D Unconference Unconference: Architectures You've Always Wondered About 17:05 Ballroom BC Session Recommender Systems Unpacking how Ads Ranking Works @Pinterest Aayush Mudgal Senior Machine Learning Engineer @Pinterest, Focusing on Privacy Safe Recommender Systems, IIT Kanpur Alumnus