Track host
About the track
The online world we interact with today is increasingly powered by data and by insights extracted from that data. Our ever-growing thirst for data insights and data-driven behavior (e.g. ML-based systems) is driving our industry to collect data more often from an increasingly varied set of sources. With increased amounts of data, scale becomes a challenge. To complicate matters further, customers want reliable access to high-quality data and insights. This adds availability and data quality to our list of requirements. More often than not, customers require low-latency as well, often referring to the time it takes raw data to be converted into usable insights or production-grade models. Last but not least, access patterns and use-cases dictate the form data will take when being served!
Depending on how the data will be used, the medium used to store and serve it will vary widely. OLTP/OLAP DBs, caches, object stores, search engines, graph DBs, data streams, vector DBs, and the like represent the many forms data takes to be suitable to its many uses. Come to this track to learn about new technologies, practices, and trends shaping the way you will work with data.
Sessions in this track
Tuesday 17 March. 6 sessions per track, chosen and introduced by the Track Host.
10:35 Fleming (3rd Fl.) Session Generative AI Ontology‐Driven Observability: Building the E2E Knowledge Graph at Netflix Scale Prasanna Vijayanathan, Renzo Sanchez-Silva As Netflix scales hundreds of client platforms, microservices, and infrastructure components, correlating user experience with system performance has become a hard data problem, not just an observability one. 11:45 Windsor (5th Fl.) Session Machine Learning Infrastructure From S3 to GPU in One Copy: Rethinking Data Loading for ML Training Onur Satici Staff Engineer @SpiralDB & a Core Maintainer of Vortex (LF AI & Data), Previously Building Distributed Systems @Palantir ML training pipelines treat data as static. Teams spend weeks preprocessing datasets into WebDataset or TFRecords, and when they want to experiment with curriculum learning or data mixing, they reprocess everything from scratch. 13:35 Whittle (3rd Fl.) Session Kafka Introducing Tansu.io -- Rethinking Kafka for Lean Operations Peter Morgan Founder @tansu.io What if Kafka brokers were ephemeral, stateless and leaderless with durability delegated to a pluggable storage layer? 14:45 Mountbatten (6th Fl.) Session AI/ML Chronon - Mixed-Workload Data Processing Framework Nikhil Simha Co-Founder & CTO @zipline.ai, Author of "Chronon Feature Platform", Previously @Airbnb, @Meta, and @Walmartlabs Chronon is a data processing framework open-sourced by Airbnb. It is adopted across organizations like Stripe, Netflix, OpenAI, and Uber. Chronon was originally built for ML applications. 15:55 Whittle (3rd Fl.) Session streaming The Rise of the Streamhouse: Idea, Trade-Offs, and Evolution Giannis Polyzos, Anton Borisov Over the last decade, streaming architectures have largely been built around topic-centric primitives—logs, streams, and event pipelines—then stitched together with databases, caches, OLAP engines, and (increasingly) new serving systems. 17:05 Rutherford (4th Fl.) Event Connecting the Dots: Modern Data Engineering & Architectures (Limited Space - Registration Required)QCon London 2026 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.