Strange Loop

From Bare Metal to Cloud Native; The Evolution of a Planetary-scale Distributed Database

When New Relic's in-house telemetry database (NRDB) was first created Docker didn't exist, Kafka was risky bleeding-edge technology, and running a system like it in the public cloud was prohibitively expensive. Today, NRDB is globally distributed, cloud-agnostic, and orchestrated with Kubernetes. We ingest exabytes of data into a swarm of continuously rebalanced clusters while providing a seamless experience to our users, who never have to know about any of the complexity under the hood. This talk will discuss how we got from there to here, the challenges we faced, and how we solved them. You'll walk away with a better understanding of both the theory and practice of building and operating global-scale distributed systems.

Kevin Scaldeferri

Principal Engineer at New Relic

Kevin Scaldeferri has over 20 years of experience building large scale distributed systems in the search, eCommerce, and observability spaces. He is a passionate supporter of monoids, strong type systems, and the Oxford comma.