Running low-latency workloads on Kubernetes: Lessons learned from SpiceDB - Sohan Maheshwar

Not all workloads are created equal!

While Kubernetes is designed for flexibility and scalability, it does not provide guarantees for performance-sensitive workloads by default. Without the right configurations, latency-sensitive applications can suffer from unpredictable scheduling, resource contention, and noisy neighbor effects.

This talk distills some of the lessons learned from running SpiceDB - a low-latency authorization system, on Kubernetes and how we got to 5ms p95 @ 1M Requests Per Second. The talk covers

1. Understanding and Mitigating Kubernetes Defaults
2. Advanced Resource Management Strategies
3. Scaling for Performance

By the end of this talk, attendees will understand the practical steps required to reduce unpredictable latency in Kubernetes environments. Whether you're running a global-scale system or fine-tuning a critical microservice, these best practices will help ensure your workloads run smoothly under the highest demands.

Additional notes
Have spoken at 100+ international conferences including AWS Re:Invent, KubeDay, Web Summit and more

A selection of talks can be found here: https://sohan.co/videos.html

About the speaker:
Sohan Maheshwar is a Lead Developer Advocate at AuthZed, based in the Netherlands. He started his career as a developer building mobile apps and has worked in the developer relations space since 2013, in companies such as Amazon, Fermyon and InMobi.

He has always been interested in emerging technologies and how it shapes the world around us.