Escaping the Cloud Complexity Tax with Software Ideas from the 1970s

Your application started simple. Now you're implementing distributed locks in Postgres so your Kinesis consumer doesn't conflict with your Step Function, which is coordinating with your Container App, while your Pub/Sub messages pile up because the Kubernetes CronJob that processes them is fighting with an HTTP request over the same customer record. You've added three caching layers, two message queues, and a prayer.

Sound familiar?

Modern cloud applications demand more than ever—real-time updates, multi-device experiences, snappy APIs—and we've pushed that complexity onto infrastructure that wasn't built for it. Gall's Law tells us complicated systems grow from simple ones. That's how we got here. But there's a way out.

In this talk, I'll show you how ideas from a 1973 computer science paper solve problems you're still fighting today. You'll learn:

• Why "no one owns anything" is the root cause of your distributed system chaos
• How single ownership eliminates distributed locks from your vocabulary entirely
• Why state machines become trivial when you stop fighting concurrency
• How entities can interact through messaging instead of shared databases
• Why this approach delivers single-digit millisecond latencies at massive scale

This isn't bleeding-edge tech—it's battle-tested patterns that handle the complexity tax so you don't have to.

The Speaker
Aaron Stannard is the CEO and founder of Petabridge, he is making Akka.NET to help the world’s most important companies build amazing applications with .NET.

He says he's been working on Akka.NET for over 10 years and hasn't haven’t gotten tired of it yet!

Prior to Petabridge he founded MarkedUp Analytics, a real-time in-app marketing and analytics service used by 1000+ developers. Prior to that he worked at Microsoft as a Startup Developer Evangelist.

LinkedIn, X @Aaronontheweb