We recently hosted Data @Scale, our invitation-only technical conference for engineers working on large-scale storage systems and analytics. For the second time, we hosted the event in Seattle, where the community of engineers working on high-scale systems is growing. We had a goal of bringing these vibrant engineers together to openly discuss challenges and collaborate on the development of new solutions when building services that serve millions — or even billions — of people. And we did just that by hearing a wide range of topics from speakers.

We had speakers from Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Qumulo, Tableau, Twitter, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They spoke about visual data analysis, exabyte storage systems, batch and streaming data processing, and key-value stores. While the day touched on a variety of topics, one thing was the same: All the speakers were excited to share their insights on building and operating systems in practice.