Monster Scale Summit brought together some of the sharpest minds in distributed systems, data infrastructure, and engineering leadership — all focused on one thing: what it really takes to build and operate systems at scale. From database internals to leadership lessons, here are some highlights from two packed days of tech talks.
Kelsey Hightower: Engineering at Scale: What Separates Leaders from Laggards
We kicked off with a candid conversation with Kelsey Hightower, a name that needs no introduction if you’ve ever dealt with Kubernetes, CoreOS, or even Puppet.
Kelsey has been at the center of some of the biggest shifts in infrastructure over the past decade. Hearing his perspective on what separates companies that succeed at scale from those that don’t was the most memorable part of the event for me.
Kelsey tackled questions such as:
- Misconceptions in scaling engineering efforts: What common mistakes do engineers make?
- Design trade-offs: How do you balance the need to move fast while still designing for future growth?
- Avoiding over-engineering: How do you build just enough to handle scale without building complexity that slows you down?
- Developer experience and tooling: How do you give teams the right tools without overwhelming them?
- Leadership balance: How do technical depth and soft skills factor into great engineering leadership?
And of course, I couldn’t resist asking: “Good programmers copy, great programmers paste” — is that still true? Spoiler: his answer was “They use ChatGPT!”
Kelsey shared razor-sharp, unfiltered insights throughout the unscripted live session. If you care about engineering leadership in high-scale environments, watch this – now.
Dor Laor, ScyllaDB CEO: Pushing the Boundaries of Performance
Dor Laor, ScyllaDB CEO and Co-founder, took the virtual stage to share 10 years of lessons learned building ScyllaDB, a database designed for extreme speed and scale.
Dor walked us through:
- The shard-per-core design that sets ScyllaDB apart.
- How ScyllaDB evolved from an idea (codename: “Sea Star” [C*]) to production systems handling billions of operations per day.
- What’s next in terms of performance, cost-efficiency, and scalability.
Organizations have wasted time and money overprovisioning other databases at scale. Dor presented the next generation of ScyllaDB X Cloud which provides true elasticity and unmatched storage capability, unique to ScyllaDB.
If you’re dealing with high-throughput, low-latency database workloads, take some time to absorb all the advances introduced… and how they might help your team.
Real-World Scaling Stories from Industry Leaders
One of the best parts of Monster Scale was hearing directly from the people building and operating some of the largest systems on the planet. Some of the talks that got the chat buzzing include…
Extreme Scale in Action
- Cloudflare: Serving millions of boot artifacts to a global audience.
- Agoda: Scaling 50x throughput with ScyllaDB.
- Discord: Handling trillions of search requests.
- American Express: Sharing design choices for routing global payments.
- Canva: Running machine learning workflows with over 100M images/day.
Database Internals and Their Impacts
- Avi Kivity (ScyllaDB CTO): Deep dive into engineering advances enabling massive scale.
- Felipe Mendes (ScyllaDB Technical Director): Detailed breakdown of how ScyllaDB stacks up against Cassandra 5.0.
- Responsive: Almog Gavra on replacing RocksDB with ScyllaDB to achieve next-level Kafka stream processing.
Optimizing Cost and Performance in the Cloud
- ScyllaDB: Cloud cost reduction, tiered storage, and high availability (HA) strategies.
- Slack: Managing 300+ mission-critical cron jobs efficiently.
- Yieldmo: Real savings from moving off DynamoDB to ScyllaDB.
Gwen Shapira: Reengineering Postgres for Millions of Tenants
If you think relational databases can’t handle scale, Gwen Shapira showed up to challenge that. She detailed how Nile is rethinking Postgres to serve millions of tenants and shared the real operational challenges behind that journey.
Her bottom line: “Scaling relational data is frigging hard.” But it’s also possible if you know what you’re doing.
ShareChat: Building One of the World’s Largest Feature Stores
With over 300M monthly active users, ShareChat has built a feature store that processes over a billion features per second. David and Ivan walked us through how they got there, the role ScyllaDB plays, and what they’re doing now to optimize cost without compromising on scale.
Martin Kleppmann + Chris Riccomini: Designing Data-Intensive Apps in 2025
Yes, Martin & Chris confirmed an update to “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” is on the way. But this wasn’t a book promo — it was a frank discussion on real-world data architecture, including what’s broken and what still works when scaling distributed systems.
Avi Kivity: ScyllaDB’s Monstrous Engineering Advances
Avi took us through ScyllaDB’s latest innovations, from internals to future plans — essential viewing if you’re using ScyllaDB and/or you’re curious about the engineering behind high-performance, distributed databases.
More Sessions on Tackling Scale Head-On
- Resonate, Antithesis, Turso, poolside, Uber: Simple (and not-so-simple) mechanics of scaling.
- Medium, Alex DeBrie, Guilherme Nogueira+ Nadav Har’El, Patrick Bossman: The reality of DynamoDB costs and why customers switch to ScyllaDB – plus practical migration insights.
- Kostja Osipov (ScyllaDB): Real lessons in surviving majority failures and consensus mechanics.
- Dzejla Medjedovic (Social Explorer): Exploring the benefits and tradeoffs between B-trees, B^eps-trees, and LSM-trees.
Ethan Donowitz: Database Upgrades with Shadow Clusters at Discord
Ethan gave us a compelling presentation on the use of “shadow clusters” at Discord to effectively de-risk the upgrade process in large-scale production systems. This included insights on how to build, mirror, validate, test and monitor — all practical tips you can apply to your own database environments.
Rachel Stephens + Adam Jacob: Scaling is the Funnest Game
Rachel and Adam gave us their honest take on the human side of scaling, with plenty of fun stories around technical trade-offs and why business context matters as much as engineering decisions. To quote Adam (while recounting some anecdotal coffee shop encounters with Chef users): “There is no funner game than the at-scale technology game.”
Personal Takeaways
As an event host, I get the chance to review the recordings before the show — but it’s not until the entire show is assembled and streamed online that the true depth and quality of content becomes apparent to me.
Also, what a privilege it was to interview Kelsey in person. I’ve used many of the systems and software he has influenced, so having a chat with him was both inspiring and grounding. You couldn’t ask for a better role model in software engineering leadership. Cheers mate!
Monster Scale Summit wasn’t just about theory — it was about what happens when systems, teams, and businesses hit real limits and what it takes to move past them. From deep engineering to leadership lessons, if you’re working on systems that need to scale and perform predictably, this was a treasure trove of insights.
And if you missed it? Check out the replays — because this is the kind of knowledge that will save you months of effort and pain.
Watch Tech Talk Replays On-Demand
