Storage Developer Conference

Storage Developer Conference
Name	Storage Developer Conference
Status	Active
Genre	Technology conference
Frequency	Annual
Location	Varies
First	2014
Organizer	Illuminata (original), independent community organizers

Storage Developer Conference

The Storage Developer Conference is an annual professional event focused on data storage systems, cloud computing, file systems, block storage, and distributed systems. The conference gathers software engineers, system architects, researchers, and product managers from companies such as Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, and IBM to exchange technical developments, best practices, and open-source collaboration. Attendees include contributors from projects like Linux kernel, Ceph, Kubernetes, OpenStack, and Apache Cassandra.

Overview

The conference centers on implementation-driven presentations, deep-dive tutorials, and roundtable discussions involving technologies such as NVMe, SSD, NVMe over Fabrics, RAID, and object storage. Organizers emphasize practical engineering content over marketing, attracting engineers from Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Samsung Electronics, and Western Digital. Sessions often reference standards and consortia such as SNIA, JEDEC, NVM Express, IETF, and OASIS.

History

Founded in the 2010s with roots tied to companies and communities like Illuminata and early cloud pioneers at Rackspace, the event evolved alongside projects such as XFS, Btrfs, ZFS, and GlusterFS. Early years featured speakers from Yahoo!, HP, EMC Corporation, and NetApp, reflecting enterprise storage trends. Over time the agenda incorporated contributions from academic groups at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University alongside corporate engineering teams from Dropbox, Box, Salesforce, and Pinterest.

Conference Format and Events

Typical formats include keynote sessions, technical talks, panel discussions, hands-on workshops, and lightning talks. Keynotes have been delivered by executives and technical leaders from Google Cloud Platform, Azure, AWS, Facebook Connectivity, and research labs such as Bell Labs and Microsoft Research. Workshops often partner with open-source projects like Redis, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Prometheus to demonstrate storage integration. The event also hosts hackathons and birds-of-a-feather meetups involving communities from Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, OpenStack Foundation, and Apache Software Foundation.

Topics and Technologies Covered

Common topics include persistent memory, DRAM, non-volatile memory express, NVMe-oF, erasure coding, replication protocols, consensus algorithms like Paxos and Raft, and database storage engines such as RocksDB and LevelDB. Sessions explore trade-offs in designs used by platforms including Hadoop, Apache Spark, Cassandra, HBase, and Elasticsearch. Networking and infrastructure talks reference RDMA, TCP/IP, InfiniBand, and Ethernet innovations from vendors like Mellanox Technologies. Storage management and observability draw on tools such as Prometheus, Grafana Labs, Fluentd, and Elastic Stack.

Notable Speakers and Keynotes

Past speakers include engineers and researchers affiliated with Google Research, Facebook AI Research, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, Intel Labs, and university labs at MIT CSAIL, Berkeley RISELab, and ETH Zurich. Keynotes have come from leaders formerly at Netflix OSS, Dropbox, Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE. Conference panels have featured contributors to projects like Kubernetes SIG Storage, Ceph Core, Btrfs-devel, and Linux Kernel Mailing List representatives.

Industry Impact and Community

The conference influences production deployments at major providers and startups, informing designs at organizations such as Snowflake Computing, Databricks, Confluent, HashiCorp, and MongoDB, Inc.. It fosters collaboration across corporate, academic, and open-source communities, facilitating RFC-style proposals and reference implementations that feed into standards bodies including NVM Express and SNIA. Alumni networks and attendee meetups extend into local chapters in technology hubs like San Francisco, New York City, London, Bangalore, and Berlin.

Attendance and Registration Details

Attendance draws engineers, managers, and researchers from startups to multinational corporations; registrants often come from Google, AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM, Oracle Corporation, VMware, Dell Technologies, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Registration tiers typically include general admission, student rates associated with universities like Stanford University and UC Berkeley, and sponsor packages for firms such as Intel, Samsung, and Seagate Technology. Venue selections have included conference centers near technology clusters such as Silicon Valley, Seattle, Austin, Texas, and Cambridge, UK.

Category:Technology conferences