You can't manage what you don't measure, and this includes your cloud costs. But how detailed should this measurement be? And how will the data translate into impact?

Bill Tarr has the most interesting job in the world. He and his team of SaaS Evangelists at the AWS SaaS Factory work with companies large and small to help them build SaaS on AWS.

Ryan Worl, co-founder and CTO of WarpStream, is on a mission to re-engineer fundamental infrastructure on top of S3. Starting with metrics at Uber, continuing with Husky - DataDog's platform for events, logs and everything except metrics and then... Ryan thought "it will be cool to re-build Kafka on S3", reached out to other developers to hear their thoughts... and ended up building WarpStream.

We invited Anna Povzner, director of engineering at Confluent, to the show to discuss Kora. Kora is a Cloud Native platform based on Apache Kafka, which her team at Confluent built. Anna and her team recently published a paper about Kora in VLDB 2023, and it won the industry's best paper award.

In the last year or two I started hearing a lot about cell-based architectures. Usually in the form of “We had a lot of issues scaling our infrastructure, but then we moved to cell-based architectures” and “I wish I’ve learned about cell based architectures earlier, it would have saved me a lot of pain”. As a result, I’ve wanted to share knowledge about cell-based architectures with this community for a while now.

Krishna Raman has many years of experience building platforms for developers. Now he's applying this experience at Delta Streams to build a serverless platform for stream processing in SQL.

You are a founding engineer at a SaaS startup. You built the MVP, and to everyone's great delight - usage is picking up. What's next?

Did you know that Postgres that lets you write data that you can’t query? Events that will show up in the write-ahead log (WAL) of the database but not in any table.

Andrew Atkinson took a Rails web application that was struggling with load, and optimized it to handle over 9000 HTTP requests per second with an average latency of 35ms end to end. Handling a much higher load, on a smaller RDS instance, with lower latencies. He then shared his expertise by writing a book: "High-Performance Postgres with Rails."

Tools we mentioned:

Ensuring your production system is well-behaved is table stakes for any SaaS. The space around monitoring and alerting is complex and moving fast, so it is too easy to end up with results that are worse than useless. Alert fatigue is real, and developers must learn to avoid this.