"Immutable Values in the Big Wide World" by Tim Ewald and Paul deGrandis

Tim Ewald and Paul deGrandis explain how Kevel built a high-performance, causally consistent data distribution system using memory-mapped databases and hybrid logical clocks.

The future of cloud native architectures is not serverless functions or containerized code access remote stores. It is ubiquitous quasi-infinite storage accessed by machines with a lot of memory running runtimes that can use it. In the first half of this talk, Tim will lay out the problems Kevel faced with it's legacy distributed architecture, the tensions at play in addressing the issues, and the question he asked (inspired from his time working on Datomic) that set things on their current path. In the second half, Paul will explain how we have used memory mapped databases, low latency object storage and hybrid logical clocks to build a high performance causally consistent world-wide data distribution system based on value change streams. Recorded Oct 25, 2024 at Clojure/conj 2024 in Alexandria, VA