How to Build the Fastest RPC

Alex Gallego, a principal engineer at Akamai’s Platform Group, presented a session titled "SMF: The Fastest RPC in the West" at the ScyllaDB Summit, focusing on the development of SMF, a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework designed to achieve microsecond tail latency. Drawing on his experience as the founder and CTO of Concord.io, a distributed stream processing engine built in C++ for enhanced performance, Gallego highlighted the limitations of existing open-source queues in handling high traffic and explained how SMF addresses these challenges. SMF is built on the Seastar framework, which is also used by ScyllaDB, and Gallego shared benchmarks demonstrating significant improvements in tail latency compared to other RPC systems. The session offered attendees a user-centric walkthrough of SMF's internals and emphasized its potential for high-performance computing environments.