At ScyllaDB we have found a common thread within our user base: the need for developers to create and maintain low-latency, high-performance, highly available applications that can readily, reliably scale to meet their ever-growing data demands. While Scylla can be part of this big data revolution, it is not the sole sum or extent of what is required to power modern heterogenous data environments.
We believe there is a growing community of engineers, developers and devops practitioners who are each seeking to find or, more so, to create their own innovative solutions to the most intractable big data problems. So we want to bring them all together in community. That is what the P99 CONF is all about.
Dor Laor, ScyllaDB CEO, was the chief proponent behind creating the P99 CONF. “At ScyllaDB, we have always wanted to launch an event for the community of developers who work on high performance distributed applications. Building on the success of our user conferences we’re now glad to initiate a vendor-neutral industry event centered around low latency, high performance, high availability and real-time technologies – ranging from operating systems, CPUs, middleware, databases and observability.”
Glauber Costa, Staff Engineer at Datadog, concurs on the need for such an event: “The engineering community that is concerned with low latencies is pretty diverse. You have everything from operating systems primitives to application interfaces to algorithms. Not to mention server components like drives and network interfaces. It is important to bring these different aspects together so we learn from best practices across a wide range of experiences. So I think the P99 CONF is a great idea.”
All Things P99
P99 CONF is sort of a self-selecting audience title. If you know you know. If you are asking yourself “Why P99?” or “What is a P99?” this show may not be for you. But for those who do not know but are still curious, P99 is a latency threshold, often expressed in terms of milliseconds (or even microseconds) under which 99% of a network transaction occurs. Those last 1% of transactions represent the long-tail connections that can lead to retries, timeouts and frustrated users. Given that even a single modern complex web page may be created out of dozens of assets and multiple database calls, hitting a snag due to even one of those long-tail events it is far more likely than most people think. This conference is for professionals of all stripes that are looking to bring their latencies down as low as possible for reliable, fast applications of all sorts — consumer apps, enterprise architectures, or the Internet of Things.
P99 CONF is the place where industry leading engineers can present novel approaches for solving complex problems, efficiently, at speed. There’s no other event like this. A conference by engineers for engineers. P99 CONF is for a highly technical developer audience, focused on technology, not products, and will be vendor / tool agnostic. Vendor pitches are not welcome.
Sign Up Today!
P99 CONF will be held free and online October 6-7, 2021. You can sign up today for updates and reminders as the event approaches.
If your title includes terms like “IT Architect,” “Software Engineer,” “Developer,” “Software Engineer,” “SRE,” or “DevOps,” this is your tribe. Your boss is not invited.
Call For Speakers
For P99 CONF to truly succeed it must be driven by leaders and stakeholders in the developer community, and we welcome your response to our Call for Speakers.
Are you a developer, architect, DevOps, SRE with a novel approach to high performance and low latency? Perhaps you’re a production-oriented practitioner looking to share your best practices for service level management, or a new approach to system management or monitoring that helps to shave valuable milliseconds off application performance.
Speaker FAQs
1. What type of content are you looking for? Is there a theme?
We’re looking for compelling technical sessions, novel algorithms, exciting optimizations, case studies, and best practices.
P99 CONF is designed to highlight the engineering challenges and creative solutions required for low-latency, high performance, high availability distributed computing applications. We’d like to share your expertise with a highly technical audience of industry professionals. Here are the categories we are looking for talks in:
- Development — Techniques in programming languages and operating systems
- Architecture — High performance distributed systems, design patterns and frameworks
- Performance — Capacity planning, benchmarking and performance testing
- DevOps — Observability & optimization to meet SLAs
- Use Cases — Low-latency applications in production and lessons learned
Example topics include…
- Operating systems techniques — eBPF, io_uring, XDP and friends
- Framework development — Most exciting new enhancements of golang, Rust and JVMs
- Containerization, virtualization and other animals
- Databases, streaming platforms, and distributed computing technologies
- CPUs, GPUs and 1Us
- Tools — Observability tools, debugging, tracing and whatever helps your night vision
- Storage methods, filesystems, block devices, object store
- Methods and processes — Capacity planning, auto scaling and SLO management
2. Does my presentation have to include p99s, specifically?
No. It’s the name of the conference, not a strict technical requirement.
You are free to look at average latencies, p95s or even p99.9s. Or you might not even be focused on latencies per se, but on handling massive data volumes, throughputs, I/O mechanisms, or other intricacies of high performance, high availability distributed systems.
3. Is previous speaking experience required?
Absolutely not, first time speakers are welcome and encouraged!
Have questions before submitting? Feel free to ask us at community@scylladb.com.
4. If selected, what is the time commitment?
We are looking for 15-20 minute sessions which will be pre-recorded and live Q&A during the event. We expect the total time commitment to be 4-5 hours.
You’ll need to attend a 30 min speaker briefing and a 1 hour session recording appointment, all done virtually. Additionally, we ask that all speakers log onto the virtual conference platform 30 minutes before your session and join for live Q&A on the platform during and following your session. And, of course, all speakers are encouraged to attend the entire online conference to see the other sessions as well.
5. What language should the content be in?
While we hope to expand language support in the future, we ask that all content be in English.
6. What makes for a good submission?
There’s usually not one thing alone that makes for a good submission; it’s a combination of general worthiness of the subject, novelty of approach to a solution, usability/applicability to others, deep technical insights, and/or real-world lessons learned.
Session descriptions should be no more than 250 words long. We’ll look at submissions using these criteria:
Be authentic — Your peers want your personal experiences and examples drawn from real-world scenarios
Be catchy — Give your proposal a simple and straightforward but catchy title
Be interesting — Make sure the subject will be of interest to others; explain why people will want to attend and what they’ll take away from it
Be complete — Include as much detail about the presentation as possible
Don’t be “pitchy” — Keep proposals free of marketing and sales.
Be understandable — While you can certainly cite industry terms, try to write a jargon-free proposal that contains clear value for attendees
Be deliverable — Sessions have a fixed length, and you will not be able to cover everything. The best sessions are concise and focused.
Be specific — Overviews aren’t great in this format; the narrower and more specific your topic is, the deeper you can dive into it, giving the audience more to take home
Be cautious — Live demos sometimes don’t go as planned, so we don’t recommend them
Be rememberable — Leave your audience with take-aways they’ll be able to take back to their own organizations and work. Give them something they’ll remember for a good long time.
We’ll reject submissions that contain material that is vague, inauthentic, or plagiarized.
No vendor pitches will be accepted.
7. If selected, can I get help on my content & what equipment do I need?
Absolutely, our content team is here to help.
We will want to touch base with you 1-2 times to help you with any content questions you may need and offer graphic design assistance. This conference will be a virtual event and we’ll provide you with a mic and camera if needed (and lots of IT help along the way). Need something else? Let us know and we’ll do our best.