System Architecture and Design

Presenters Stuart Clark Source Conf42 SRE 2026 Scale or Fail: How Spotify Solved the Abstraction Paradox 🚀 In the high-stakes world of software engineering, we often treat abstraction as our greatest ally. We build layers to hide complexity, simplify workflows, and help our teams move faster. But what happens when those very abstractions become your biggest enemy during a 3:00 a.m. critical incident? Stuart Clark, Senior Developer Advocate at Spotify, recently shared a compelling story about how Spotify nearly fell into the abstraction trap and how they engineered their way out of it. This isn’t just a story about code; it’s about scaling operational knowledge across thousands of engineers. ...

Presenters Mukul Kumar Gaur Source Conf42 SRE 2026 Hello everyone, and a huge thank you for joining this insightful session with Mukul Kumar Gaur! Today, we’re diving deep into a pressing challenge many airlines and Online Booking Platforms (OBPs) face: how to scale NDC shopping traffic while keeping prices accurate and systems reliable. Get ready to discover how intelligent caching is revolutionizing airline distribution! The NDC Challenge: Navigating a Skyrocketing Demand 💥 The world of airline distribution is evolving rapidly, moving towards modern retailing and dynamic offers. While this brings incredible flexibility, it also creates a massive headache for infrastructure. Mukul Kumar Gaur highlights a dramatic increase in shopping requests, not just in volume but also in complexity. Each request now demands significantly more computation than ever before, involving intricate calculations for fares, taxes, inventory, availability, and merchandising rules. ...

Presenters Shruthi Sepuri Source Conf42 SRE 2026 Beyond Uptime: Why Your “Healthy” System Might Still Be Failing the Business 🚀 In the world of regulated enterprise platforms, we often obsess over a single version of the truth: the dashboard. If the lights are green, we breathe a sigh of relief. But what if those green lights are lying? Shruthi Sepuri, an expert in enterprise systems testing and reliability, argues that for systems making high-stakes business decisions, technical health is no longer the gold standard. A system can have 99.99% uptime and still be a catastrophic failure if the decisions it automates are wrong. ...

Presenters Makarand Gujarathi Source Conf42 SRE 2026 From Chaos to Clarity: Revolutionizing Incident Response with AI and MCP 🚀 In the world of modern software, the transition from monoliths to microservices has brought unparalleled scale but also a massive headache for on-call engineers. If you have ever been paged at 2:00 AM, you know the drill: a single user request might touch five to 10 microservices, each with its own database, cache, and deployment pipeline. When things break, the noise is deafening. ...

Presenters Jyothish Sreedharan Source Conf42 SRE 2026 Building Resilient Data Pipelines: AI Governance Meets Stream Processing 🚀 In today’s data-driven world, organizations thrive on massive data pipelines that pull information from a multitude of sources – databases, APIs, event streams, and logs. However, these pipelines often falter due to evolving data structures (schema drift), subtle meaning changes (semantic inconsistencies), and the sheer complexity of operations. Enter Jyothish Sreedharan, who presents a groundbreaking architecture that harmonizes stream processing, semantic intelligence, and cloud-native infrastructure to create injection systems that are not just self-adapting and resilient, but truly production-ready. ...