Alex Seaton, Staff Engineer at Man Group, presented “How to Build a Database Without a Server” at QCon London 2025. Seaton demonstrated how they migrated an older hedge fund trading system application

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At QCon London 2025, Alex Seaton from Man Group explained the transition from a high-maintenance MongoDB server farm to a serverless database solution using ArcticDB. The new system leverages Python and C++ for processing data stored in object storage. Challenges such as clock drift and distributed locking were discussed, with Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) used to manage data consistency. Seaton highlighted issues with garbage collection and compaction while emphasizing ongoing improvements in object storage and concurrency models.

QCon London 2025: How to Build a Database Without a Server