Avi Kivity: A Window Into Database Operations from the Disk’s Perspective

Avi Kivity, ScyllaDB's CTO and co-founder, has pioneered a method to gain deep insights into the operations of NVMe SSDs, particularly in the context of ScyllaDB's unique close-to-the-hardware architecture, which he presented at P99 CONF. By visualizing real-time IO operations, including reads, writes, and disk bandwidth usage on AWS EC2 I4i instances, Kivity elucidates how ScyllaDB's shard-per-core architecture and other database operations are reflected in disk behavior. He further explores how these operations manifest on monitoring dashboards, providing an in-depth look at database internals. The P99 CONF also features additional talks on various low-latency engineering topics, such as analyzing virtual machine overhead, the use of user-mode threads for concurrency, optimizing performance with variable payloads, and maintaining low latency in user-defined functions using WebAssembly.