Stories by Zhenzhong Xu on Medium
A story about building something that learned the weight of waking . I started with a simple experiment: what happens if an AI agent runs continuously with persistent memory instead of resetting every session? Eleven days later, the result was not just a system architecture. It was a working relationship. I’ve spent my career building data and AI infrastructure. This was different. This wasn’t…
Part I: Enterprise Productivity Intro AI relies on data, yet enterprises still struggle with fragmented metadata, lack visibility into interconnected digital assets, disconnected governance, and siloed operations. The rise of LLM, AI Agent automation, and real-time analytics has made these issues even more pressing. First, the increasing complexity of the “ Modern Data Stack ” continues to plague…
My personal journey with streaming data started over ten years ago. Around 2010, an online poker boom phenomenon was at its peak globally. At the time, I was working at Microsoft, and many friends and colleagues were into this curious and mathematically complex game. A group of friends and I got our hands on a few billion hand histories. All of us are pretty competitive, so we decided to build a…
At 11 PM on a Friday evening, the only light in Alice’s home office was the glow of her laptop screen. Her gaze was fixated on the cursor blinking in relentless succession, echoing the escalating internal chatter, each one sliding over the next in a growing storm of anxiety. Trouble had been brewing in the past few weeks: the project had quality issues, and the team was on the verge of losing a…
Saving Millions with 5-Minute Streaming SQL Techniques & Future-Proofing an Optimized Composable Data Ecosystem The blog is an extended written version of my 2023 talk at the Current conference. Please find the link to the talk recording and the slide deck . Abstract Companies are looking for ways to reduce streaming infrastructure costs in the current macroeconomic environment. However, it is a…
My name is Zhenzhong Xu . I joined Netflix in 2015 as a founding engineer on the Real-time Data Infrastructure team and later led the Stream Processing Engines team. I developed an interest in real-time data in the early 2010s, and ever since believe there is much value yet to be uncovered. Netflix was a fantastic place to be surrounded by many amazing colleagues. I can’t be more proud of everyone…
Swap Engine Mid-flight — Transform Stateful Services the Streaming Way I recently had an interesting discussion with my colleague around some of the “unconventional” ways of utilizing stream processing methodologies. I briefly touched a use case I was previously involved in, on migrating a large monolithic stateful service into a set of cohesive microservices, while still having to maintain full…
The Big Data Paradox — a thought experiment for the data-mindful Here is an interesting thought experiment for you to try. Let’s make a few assumptions first: All knowledge/facts in this world can be digitized and stored over connected computer hardware across datacenters worldwide. Understanding a single data point is usually less valuable than a combination of related data sets, and their…
In the technology world, things move so fast and problems are sometimes solved faster than they appear, so there are very few buzzwords that can last more than a decade. Big data is one of them. Recently here in the Silicon Valley, I often hear investors and founders talking about how not bringing up this type of buzzwords during pitching. I was curious, but I can sense there are a certain amount…