Martin Thompson

Martin is a Java Champion with over 2 decades of experience building complex and high-performance computing systems. He is most recently known for his work on Aeron and SBE. Previously at LMAX he was the co-founder and CTO when he created the Disruptor. Prior to LMAX Martin worked for Betfair, three different content companies wrestling with the world largest product catalogues, and was a lead on some of the most significant C++ and Java systems of the 1990s in the automotive and finance domains.

He blogs at mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com, and can be found giving training courses on performance and concurrency when he is not cutting code to make systems better.

Consensus protocols enable distributed systems to agree a common view of shared state. This common view allows a cluster to continue service while a majority of its members are available. Raft was designed to be understandable and is based on simple proven protocol, however like most consensus protocols there is little guidance on how to implement it efficiently.

Aeron was designed to be an understandable messaging system, it was also designed to be fast, very fast, even in its Java implementation. If the design principles of Aeron were applied to Raft, could we create a high-performance consensus implementation? Come to this talk if you would like to find out how to build a high performance distributed event system in Java and see what happened when Aeron met Raft.