Emiliano Mancuso

Lambda architecture is not dead. At Fresha, we serve ~1M daily bookings through a streaming platform that has evolved for over two years, and we are just getting started. This talk shares our journey of building a cost-effective, production-ready data platform on Kafka, Snowflake, and now Iceberg and StarRocks. Pillar 1: Ingestion - Simple but Solid From PostgreSQL to Debezium to Kafka to Snowpipe. Data lands in Snowflake in under 2 seconds. This layer has remained untouched since day one, and that stability enabled everything else. Pillar 2: Consolidation - Cost Effective Here is where Lambda architecture shines. We materialize tables every 20 minutes, then merge live CDC events at query time through views. This provides deduplication, schema evolution handling, and near-real-time freshness without running expensive compute 24/7. The pattern is old. It works. Pillar 3: Consumption - The Clever Bit Here is what we are proud of: we use Snowflake as an API to support production load, which Snowflake is not designed for. Through smart architecture (connection pooling, query optimisation, view-based routing), we achieve Enterprise-tier capabilities on a non-Enterprise Snowflake plan.…