Unconference: Connecting Systems

From the same track

Session architecture

From Fan-Out to Fast: Sub-100ms API Design in Distributed Systems

Monday Mar 16 / 10:35AM GMT

A “simple” API request rarely stays simple. In distributed systems, one call quickly turns into fan-out across gateways, services, caches, and databases — and your p99 becomes the sum of every hop and every flaky dependency.

Speaker image - Saranya Vedagiri

Saranya Vedagiri

Senior Staff Engineer @eBay

Session Platform Engineering

APIs for Agents: Rethinking API Programs in the MCP Era

Monday Mar 16 / 01:35PM GMT

As API programs mature, a familiar gap emerges: some teams operate with strong standards, reusable platforms, and clear governance,  while others rely on informal guidance and best-effort consistency.

Speaker image - Jim Gough

Jim Gough

Distinguished Engineer, API Platform Lead Architect @Morgan Stanley, Co-Author of Optimizing Java

Speaker image - Andreea Niculcea

Andreea Niculcea

Vice President @Morgan Stanley

Session architecture

Managing Asynchronous APIs at Scale

Monday Mar 16 / 05:05PM GMT

When event-driven architectures are small, teams can reason about events through word-of-mouth. They know who publishes what, who consumes it, and how messages flow through the system. Teams manage their own infrastructure or raise tickets to request changes.

Speaker image - Ian Cooper

Ian Cooper

Senior Principal Engineer @Just Eat Takeaway

Session Observability

Uncorking Queueing Bottlenecks with OpenTelemetry

Monday Mar 16 / 11:45AM GMT

Queues are the backbone of scalable, asynchronous systems, but they can easily create a tangled web of complexity. When things slow down, the bottleneck could be anywhere, from producer lag to consumer exhaustion, and standard metrics often fail to show the full picture.

Speaker image - Julian Wreford

Julian Wreford

Team Lead of Operability Team @Gearset, Software Engineer Turned Accidental SRE

Speaker image - Oli Lane

Oli Lane

Engineering Team Lead @Gearset, Focusing on Engineering Culture, Observability, and Platform Reliability

Session AI

Enchant Your AI and APIs with eBPF Magic 🪄

Monday Mar 16 / 03:55PM GMT

It is a common occurrence to see applications thrown over the fence, landing somewhere in production without a second thought about their lifecycle or how they may need maintaining in the future to connect to more efficient API endpoints.

Speaker image - Dan Finneran

Dan Finneran

Principal Community Advocate at Isovalent @Cisco