Timing is everything. If a system does not respond in a timely manner then: at best, its value is greatly diminished; and at worst, it is effectively unavailable. Reactive systems need to meet predictable response time guarantees regardless of load or datasets size, even in the presence of burst traffic and partial failure conditions.

In this talk we will explore what is means to be responsive and the fundamental design patterns required to meet predictable response time guarantees. Queueing theory, Little's Law, Amdahl's Law, Universal Scalability Law - we'll cover the good bits. Then we'll explore algorithms that work with these laws to deliver timely responses from our applications no matter what gets thrown at them.

Martin Thompson - High-performance and low-latency specialist

Martin is a high-performance and low-latency specialist, with experience gained over two decades working on the bleeding edge of large transactional and big-data systems. He believes in Mechanical Sympathy, i.e. applying an understanding of the hardware to the creation of software as being fundamental to delivering elegant high-performance solutions. The Disruptor framework is just one example of what his mechanical sympathy has created.

Martin was the co-founder and CTO of LMAX. He blogs at mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com, and can be found giving training courses on performance and concurrency when he is not cutting code to make systems better.