As the cloud evolves in capability, it has also become increasingly complex and difficult to program. New abstractions are necessary to ensure next-generation cloud applications are correct, simple, and efficient. In this talk, I will first describe Resilient Composition, a new abstraction that ensures fault-tolerance in applications composed from independent, distributed components. The key insight is to rely on atomic, fault-tolerant “steps” that span component operations and messages. I will present DARQ, an efficient execution engine for such steps, and Distributed Speculative Execution, a transparent optimization that dramatically reduces overhead of Resilient Composition. I will also briefly discuss BRAD, an abstraction that virtualizes cloud data management and enables automatic data infrastructure design. Together, these solutions represent an important step towards a more declarative cloud, where strong primitives separate user applications from their underlying infrastructure, paving a way for simplicity and efficiency through automation.

Bio:
Tianyu Li is a final-year PhD student at MIT, advised by Professor Sam Madden. His research interests span distributed systems and database systems, with an emphasis on building new abstractions for the modern cloud. Tianyu currently focuses on building better fault-tolerance for the cloud through the novel abstraction of Resilient Composition, and has worked closely with industry leaders like Microsoft to deploy these solutions. Before MIT, Tianyu obtained his MS and BS from CMU.