Low and predictable latency have been an edge in financial trading. Aeron has been pushing the limit on what is possible for IPC, on-premise, and in the cloud messaging. Can we do better? Reaching back into computer science history, techniques like Virtual Synchrony can be used to, not only reduce latency, but also provide high-availability and avoid the complexity of distributed concurrency. In this talk we will explore an approach for system composition that some financial organizations use to give an edge when building mission critical systems.
Interview:
What is the focus of your work?
I work on a future product called Aeron Sequencer at Adaptive.
It is based on the cluster available in the open source Aeron project that allows teams to design and build trading systems with low and predictable latency.
What’s the motivation for your talk?
Exploring ideas at the heart of distributed systems such as Virtual synchrony, Sequencer and state machine composition. Also asking "why?" quite a lot.
Who is your talk for?
Developers, architects, anyone who likes to ask "why?", take a wider view and think about system design as part of the solution, not just a constraint.
What do you want someone to walk away with from your presentation?
Understand how (and why) key concepts from distributed systems design can be used to improve latency metrics.
What do you think is the next big disruption in software?
Yes, I also think the next big disruption is AI but not in the same dark scary way it is often described.
The ability for AI to do the simple, "solved", boring stuff well, means we will be forced to do a much better job of separating concerns and domain design.
We will need to design more modular solutions and do better at protocol and API design, in order to use AI to our advantage.
Speaker

Amir Langer
Principal Software Engineer @Adaptive Financial Consulting
Amir has been enjoying the challenges of software development for the past 30 years.
His career started with an MSc in computer science, then moved to software engineering roles (using Java since its first release), focusing on large scale distributed and high-performance low latency systems. In the finance domain, Amir was the first developer at LMAX exchange and a team lead for many years. Now he is a principal developer at Adaptive, the home of Aeron, collaborating on future Aeron products.