Code Story episode

S12 Bonus: Decoupling Compute and Storage to Solve the Petabyte-Scale Log Cost Crisis and Power Real-Time AI SRE Engines with David Sztykman, Chief Architect & VP of Product at Hydrolix

Jan 21, 2026 · Season 12 · 30 min

Data streaming observability, at the speed of insight

David Sztykman lives in Paris, but used to live in New York for a time. He has always been into video, streaming and photography. For the latter, as a kid, his Dad had a film developing lab in their basement, so he spent many hours doing that before digital changed it all. As a student, he used to tinker with open source video streaming libraries, and eventually worked for Alkamai, responsible for the streaming media for Europe (think the Olympics or Super Bowl). Outside of tech, he has 2 kids and they like to do a lot of legos together. But in general, they are outside kids so usually, they like to get out of the house and do active things.

In his prior role, David was consistently alerted about poor performance on the video streaming. He started to dig into the data streaming portion of, to be alerted on shifts in the stream itself. After a few other opportunities, he was approached to build real time CDN observability, for distributed infrastructure.

This is the creation story of Hydrolix.