The systems issues addressed by the Reactive Manifesto are far from new. Highly concurrent event-driven approaches have been common for years in diverse areas from low-level hardware to large-scale distributed systems. What is new is the much broader availability of modern programming practices which allow developers to take advantage of these approaches in a clean, comprehensible, and extensible way.
 
This session will start with a brief tour along this evolutionary path, from the realtime search pipeline at eBay, to various asynchronous techniques at Google, to highly responsive game services at KIXEYE. It will outline the key aspects of systems architecture, service design, and programming model which enable us to build services that are robust to load and to failure, that efficiently saturate available resources, and that respond rapidly to callers.
 
After covering how we got here from there, it will conclude with some informed speculation about where we are going next.