It is one thing to solve performance challenges when you have plenty of time, money, and expertise available. Many performance experts have deep knowledge of a specific system and work on large-scale problems where investing time and effort to get a fantastic result is the norm.

But what do you do in the opposite situation? If you are a small startup with no time or money and still need to deliver outstanding performance? When you may have experts in parts of the stack, but performance has to be delivered across the entire application and infrastructure stack?

It may be tempting to think that as a small startup, you can just ignore performance until you scale – but your customers will soon tell you otherwise. In this talk, Gwen talks about her journey from in-depth Kafka performance to leading a small team of engineers to ship a high-performance MVP. She’ll share the decisions that worked well, the mistakes made, and the tools that were worth far beyond their cost.