During my time at Microsoft, I have worked on several different distributed systems that the company uses internally. In this talk, I will describe two of them and also discuss the trade-offs and design choices that were made to build and run these systems. I will firstly talk about Microsoft Cosmos which is Microsoft’s internal big data framework that runs dryad-like jobs which are programmed using the SCOPE language. Then, I will describe FaRM which is a main-memory distributed transactional store that exploits new hardware trends such as RDMA and non-volatile memory to achieve performance that is several orders of magnitude faster than systems that offer similar capability but run using TCP.

I completed my undergraduate degrees at the University of New South Wales in Computer Science and Mathematics. After graduating in 2009 I moved to Seattle, Washington to work at Microsoft’s Cosmos, initially working on job scheduling and then the distributed store. After leaving the Cosmos team in 2014 I moved to Microsoft Research Redmond and then Microsoft Research Cambridge in 2017, where I worked on multiple projects including FaRM.