Track host
About the track
This track focuses on achieving efficiency in software architecture by emphasizing cost-effective performance at scale. As systems grow, so do infrastructure costs and operational complexity—making architectural decisions critical to long-term sustainability. We'll explore how to design systems that deliver high performance while minimizing compute, storage, and data transfer costs, with an eye toward maximizing ROI.
Topics include cost-aware architectural patterns, efficient data modeling, scalable system design, and techniques for measuring and optimizing resource usage. We’ll also examine how tooling, observability, and automation contribute to keeping performance high and costs under control.
Beyond the technical layers, we’ll consider how teams can work together efficiently—how organizational structure, ownership models, and decision-making processes impact architectural outcomes. The goal is to help engineering leaders build systems that are not only technically performant and cost-efficient but also adaptable and sustainable in fast-moving environments.
Sessions in this track
Wednesday 19 November. 5 sessions per track, chosen and introduced by the Track Host.
10:35 Ballroom A Session AI/ML Producing the World's Cheapest Tokens: A How-to Guide Meryem Arik Co-Founder and CEO @Doubleword (Previously TitanML), Recognized as a Technology Leader in Forbes 30 Under 30, Recovering Physicist AI inference is expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. In this talk, we’ll break down how to systematically drive down the cost per token across different types of AI workloads. 11:45 Ballroom A Session Capacity Planning How Netflix Shapes our Fleet for Efficiency and Reliability Joseph Lynch, Argha C Netflix runs on a complex multi-layer cloud architecture made up of thousands of services, caches, and databases. As hardware options, workload patterns, cost dynamics and the Netflix products evolve, the cost-optimal hardware and configuration for running our services is constantly changing. 13:35 Ballroom A Session AI Architecture Realtime and Batch Processing of GPU Workloads Joseph Stein Principal Architect of Research & Development @SS&C Technologies, Previous Apache Kafka Committer and PMC Member SS&C Technologies runs 47 trillion dollars of assets on our global private cloud. We have the primitives for infrastructure as well as platforms as a service like Kubernetes, Kafka, NiFi, Databases, etc. 14:45 Ballroom A Session Architecture From ms to µs: OSS Valkey Architecture Patterns for Modern AI Dumanshu Goyal Uber Technical Lead @Airbnb Powering $11B Transactions, Formerly @Google and @AWS As AI applications demand faster and more intelligent data access, traditional caching strategies are hitting performance and reliability limits. 15:55 Ballroom A Session Platform Engineering Write-Ahead Intent Log: A Foundation for Efficient CDC at Scale Vinay Chella, Akshat Goel As companies grow, so does the complexity of keeping distributed systems in sync. At DoorDash, we tackled this challenge while building a high-throughput, domain-oriented data platform for capturing changes across hundreds of services.QCon San Francisco 2025 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.