Something About Distributed Systems

In this track you’ll hear from engineers and architects who are living with distributed systems every day—shipping features, firefighting incidents, and pushing the limits of scale. Talks will focus on:

  • Latency in the wild – How teams measure, understand, and reduce user-perceived latency, deal with long tails, and design APIs, retries, and backpressure that behave well under load and partial failure.
  • Consistency trade-offs – Concrete stories of choosing (and sometimes regretting) consistency models, handling stale reads and write conflicts, and designing systems that remain understandable as they grow.
  • Failure as a first-class concern – Postmortems, incident narratives, chaos experiments, and the operational practices that make failures survivable instead of catastrophic.
  • Scaling beyond “it works on my cluster” – Techniques and patterns for evolving architectures under growth: sharding, multi-region, multi-tenant, and cost-aware scaling strategies.
  • Tooling and observability – The metrics, tracing, logging, and testing approaches that make complex distributed behaviors visible and debuggable.

Expect candid war stories, design explanations grounded in trade-offs, and patterns you can take back to your own systems. The emphasis is not on idealized architectures, but on the pragmatic decisions and hard-won lessons that separate distributed systems that merely run from those you can trust in production.


Track Host

Vidhya Arvind

Tech Lead & a Founding Architect for the Data Abstraction Platform @Netflix, Previously @Box and @Verizon

Vidhya Arvind is a Tech Lead at Netflix and a founding architect of Netflix’s cutting-edge data abstraction platform. She is a recognized expert in designing and delivering scalable, high-impact data abstractions that empower thousands of developers across the organization to move faster with confidence. With expertise in crafting robust APIs and high-performance abstractions, Vidhya drives the seamless operation of complex abstractions at massive scale. She is known for her strategic thinking, curiosity, and a systems-level mindset that fuels her passion for debugging, innovating, and solving deeply technical challenges. Vidhya has played a pivotal role in shaping the evolution of Netflix's data infrastructure, enabling mission-critical systems to run with exceptional efficiency, reliability, and resilience. Vidhya lives in the Bay Area with her family and loves hiking on trails in the area.

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