Rachel Stephens (Research Director at RedMonk) introduces Monster Scale Summit 2026, an event designed for technical ICs navigating explosive growth. This event is for teams thinking about performance not as an occasional tuning exercise, but as a constant design discipline.
If you’ve attended P99 Conf in the past, Monster Scale Summit takes that same deep practitioner focus and applies it to systems operating at scale.
This RedMonk video is sponsored by ScyllaDB.
Links:
– Monster Scale Summit
– Keynote with Rachel Stephens and Adam Jacob: Scaling is the Funnest Game
– Keynote with Rachel Stephens and Adrian Cockcroft: Tales From the Long Tail
Transcript:
If you’ve attended P99 Conf, chances are you are someone who is technically in the weeds day to day and who cares deeply about application performance. P99 Conf is a fantastic event. It’s virtual so people around the world are able to come together and share their technical knowledge at an event that truly celebrates the practitioner. Monster Scale Summit is put on by the same people who organize P99 Conf, but they have a slightly different angle at this event on what it means to design a performant application. This is a conference designed for companies that are experiencing explosive growth in their traffic, in their data volumes, in anything, especially in 2026 when AI is exacerbating and making everything move so much faster. It moves the conversation from something that is technically interesting to something that is operationally existential. This is for situations where it’s not sufficient to tune your applications and systems occasionally, but are instead thinking about design and performance constantly. Because performance is often not defined by one big architectural decision, but is instead defined by a myriad of small, interconnected choices that all play off one another, especially as systems experience load. Monster Scale Summit facilitates conversations about those decisions.
This is an event for teams that are operating at scale, or for teams that see scale on the horizon and want to be better prepared. I’m Rachel Stephens, I am the research director at RedMonk, and I was fortunate enough to keynote both events last year. I had a wonderful time listening to the other speakers, and the hallway tracks were lively. And the talks at Monster Scale Summit this year look equally exciting. Camille Fournier is keynoting on what engineering leaders get wrong about scale. The creator of Redis, Salvatore Sanfilippo, is going to be speaking about Redis new vector dataset type, and Chris and Martin will be talking about designing data intensive applications. This is just a sampling of some of the amazing talks that will be happening this year. One of the things I want to iterate now is how complementary these events are. If P99 Conf is about exploring performance, Monster Scale Summit is about applying those understandings and lessons when the stakes are high. If this sounds like a conversation you want to be part of, join the ScyllaDB team at Monster Scale Summit.
