COLLOQUIUM: Lalith Suresh, "Building Scalable and Flexible Cluster Managers using Declarative Programming"

Abstract: Modern cluster managers routinely grapple with hard combinatorial optimization problems, such as policy-based load balancing, placement, scheduling, and configuration. Implementing ad-hoc heuristics to solve these problems is notoriously hard to do, making it challenging to evolve the system over time and add new features.

In this talk, I will present Declarative Cluster Managers (DCM), a general approach for building cluster managers that makes them performant and easily extensible. With DCM, developers specify the cluster manager's behavior using a high-level declarative language like SQL and let a compiler take care of generating an efficient implementation. I will show how DCM significantly lowers the barrier to building scalable and extensible cluster manager components, in the context of some real-world systems like Kubernetes.

You can check out the DCM project here: https://github.com/vmware/declarative-cluster-management/

Bio: Lalith Suresh is a researcher at VMware Research. He is currently leading efforts to simplify the design, development, and testing of large-scale cluster managers. He has also worked on areas like failure detection, programmable networking, big data, and remote memory.