Thread-per-core programming models are well known in software domains where latency is important. Pinning application threads to physical cores and handling data in a core-affine way can yield impressive results, but what is it like to build a large scale general purpose software product within these constraints?

Redpanda is a high performance persistent stream engine, built on the Seastar framework. This session will describe practical experience of building high performance systems with C++20 in an asynchronous runtime, the unexpected simplicity that can come from strictly mapping data to cores, and explore the challenges & tradeoffs in adopting a thread-per-core architecture.