Are you always looking for the "best" or the "newest" idea to solve your engineering challenges? In this talk we'll dive into the evolution of filesystems, volume management, and memory management to see how ZFS solved some of the toughest storage problems in the industry more than 20 years ago. Those tech engineering principles had shaped how I think about storage systems, became foundational for the industry and are worth revisiting.

As infrastructure grows, storage stops being just a place to keep data and becomes a critical part of platform reliability, scalability, and availability. This talk walks through common storage challenges in on-premises environments, the distributed storage systems available to address them, and the trade-offs behind different approaches, ultimately leading to Rook-Ceph as a storage solution for Kubernetes.

S3 is no longer just about buckets and objects. With new capabilities designed for analytics, AI, file-based workloads, data discovery, and event-driven architectures, it is becoming an increasingly important foundation for modern cloud applications. Whether you use S3 for application storage, data lakes, analytics, ML, or large-scale data platforms, this session will show how the latest capabilities can help you get much more from your data and solve real-world architectural challenges.