Much has been written and said about distributed systems of many different sizes, scales, and complexities. Most of the time though, we either talk about algorithms and theoretical ideas or entirely concrete specific systems: Abstract or Concrete. Gossip, failure detection, and leader election are discussed as if they’re a magical salve that can be rubbed onto a project to make it distributed. But the practical realities of distributed systems are far from...

Slack is a communication and collaboration platform for teams. Our millions of users spend 10+ hrs connected to the service on a typical working day. They expect reliability, low latency, and extraordinarily rich client experiences across a wide variety of devices and network conditions. In the talk, we'll examine the limitations that Slack's backend ran into and how we overcame them to scale from supporting small teams to serving gigantic organizations of hundreds and thousands of users. We...