The AI Runtime - Boston
Building Crashproof Agents - Alex Poliakov, Head of Customer Solutions, DBOS Inc.
Beyond the problems of accuracy and cost, AI agents are challenged by long-running execution processes, human-in-the-loop approval logic, non-deterministic call paths and upgrade complexity. Nevertheless, agents are expected to perform more important tasks over time, with increasing costs of failure. These challenges can be met with Durable Execution - a set of techniques that originated in transactional processing and now growing in popularity with agent builders. In this talk, we will introduce durable execution and the guarantees it can (and cannot) provide. We'll discuss why and how Durability is becoming a key pattern in AI Agents. Then we'll show how DBOS achieves durability using only Postgres and showcase some advanced maneuvers like queueing, upgrading long-running workflows and forking. The target audience for this talk is software developers with experience in Agentic development or general interest in reliable software. Postgres experience is a plus.
Agentic Memory: The Final Frontier - Alex Seriy, Cockroach Labs
Once agent and workflow state live in your database, three questions become sharper: what happens when a database server goes down, what happens when the fleet grows 100x, and how do you find out what your agent was actually looking at three hours ago.
This talk is about CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database that speaks Postgres and what the data tier looks like when it has the same properties we spent the last decade building into everything above it. We'll cover how it survives node, zone, and region failures with no manual intervention and no data loss; how it scales by adding nodes instead of sharding or re-architecting; and how it lets you read data exactly as it was in the past, which is useful for both debugging non-deterministic systems and answering auditors. We'll also look at what it means to keep transactional data, workflow state, and vector embeddings in one place instead of three.
The target audience is developers building agentic or high-volume transactional systems. Postgres experience is a plus, not a requirement.
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