FoundationDB Meetup [In-Person and Online]

Join us for the FoundationDB Meetup in Adobe HQ San Jose, CA!
This is a monthly meetup series for FoundationDB. We will feature an interesting roster of speakers who use or work on FoundationDB.

Agenda:

• Social Hour (6 - 6.30PM)
• Talk 1: RocksDB Storage Engine in FoundationDB (30 mins + Q&A)
  Speaker: Neethu Haneesha Bingi, Software Engineer, Apple
  Speaker Bio: Neethu is a software engineer with extensive experience in designing and building reliable, scalable storage and distributed systems. At Apple for over four years, she has been a contributor to FoundationDB and led the initiative to integrate RocksDB as a supported storage engine. Prior to Apple, Neethu held key engineering roles at Tintri, Oracle, and Meta, with a strong focus on system reliability, performance optimization in distributed systems, and storage infrastructure.
  Talk Summary: FoundationDB now supports a new storage engine: RocksDB, joining the existing lineup that includes SQLite, Redwood, and Memory storage engines. In this talk, Neethu will introduce the motivation behind integrating RocksDB into FoundationDB, share a high-level overview of RocksDB itself, and explain the integration process. She will also dive into tuning capabilities, operational considerations, and key challenges encountered along the way. This session aims to raise awareness of this new capability and what it means for the FoundationDB ecosystem.
• Talk 2: Self Healing FoundationDB From Gray Failures (30 mins + Q&A)
  Speaker: Paymaan Raza, Software Engineer, Apple
  Speaker Bio: Paymaan is a software engineer at Apple, where he works on FoundationDB. With a deep interest in databases and infrastructure, he enjoys tackling hard problems from first principles to build simple, scalable, and useful systems. Prior to Apple, he developed a core streaming platform for Meta's control plane and engineered key data infrastructure components at LinkedIn, gaining extensive experience in crafting reliable solutions for large-scale distributed environments.
  Talk Summary: Gray failures in FoundationDB are subtle performance degradations that, while not full crashes, impact system health and burden operators with manual intervention. This talk presents a simple yet effective self-healing mechanism designed to address such issues. We'll demonstrate how we reused FoundationDB's core architectural building blocks—such as unbundled roles, central Cluster Controller, transport layer latency metrics, and fast recovery—to implement a "complaining" algorithm where processes report slow peers, enabling automated detection and remediation, thereby significantly improving FoundationDB's resilience and reducing operational load.

Disclaimer - The meeting will be streamed, recorded, and uploaded to YouTube or other online streaming sites used by this group.