Building Systems That Go Fast and Fail Safely

Talk 1: Automated JDBC query caching with Valkey Modern Java applications built on relational databases often face a common challenge: as application traffic grows, read queries become the dominant source of database load. This is especially true for frequently accessed but infrequently updated data. Often times those queries require joins and aggregations across large data sets to fetch just a few rows of results. This can be very resource constraint and may even lead to performance issues. AWS Advanced JDBC wrapper presents a solution to this challenge by allowing caching query results from expensive and repetitive read queries to an in-memory cache like Valkey. You can dramatically reduce database load and improve query latency while maintaining or even improving application performance. Talk 2: Hermetically Sealed Box of Pain Most programmers encounter property-based testing as “QuickCheck, but for pure functions.” But what happens when the thing you want to test isn’t a function? What if it’s a distributed database, a consensus protocol, or an entire network of stateful…