Inside the 🦄 Unicorn: A Journey Through Backend Evolution

What goes on inside a 🦄 unicorn when the product just keeps growing?

This talk traces more than a decade of architectural evolution in a backend built primarily in Java: from the earliest services to a distributed platform that today supports trillions of interactions and billions of data points.
We’ll explore how large-scale Java systems evolve—platform decisions, interactions between over a hundred services, and design trade-offs—what breaks along the way, and which principles survive. We’ll also see how the arrival of AI is forcing us to rethink architecture to enable new experiences.

The session will have a relaxed format, in the old-school style of when we used to gather to discuss architectures in front of a whiteboard. Although it is not a session focused on framework details or specific implementations, it will offer real-world context on how a Java backend ecosystem is designed and operated at scale.

Collaboration with the Valencia Java User Group! 👯‍♂

This talk is done in collaboration with ValenciaJUG You will see the same event in their Meetup. You can choose to register in one meetup or the other. But choose just one! 😄 It will help us to calculate the people attending.