Leveraging ML to Handle the Increasing Complexity of the Cloud

Cloud services are increasingly adopting new programming models, such as microservices and serverless compute. While these frameworks offer several advantages, such as better modularity, ease of maintenance and deployment, they also introduce new hardware and software challenges.  

In this talk, I will briefly discuss the challenges that these new cloud models introduce in hardware and software, and present some of of our work on employing ML to improve the cloud’s performance predictability and resource efficiency. I will first discuss Seer, a performance debugging system that identifies root causes of unpredictable performance in multi-tier interactive microservices, and Sage, which improves on Seer by taking a completely unsupervised learning approach to data-driven performance debugging, making it both practical and scalable. Time permitting, I will also touch upon how ML can be used to simplify task placement in more complex system setups, such as those involving both cloud resources and swarms of edge devices. 

Bio: Christina Delimitrou is an Assistant Professor and the John and Norma Balen Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow at Cornell University, where she works on computer architecture and computer systems. She specifically focuses on improving the performance predictability and resource efficiency of large-scale cloud infrastructures by revisiting the way these systems are designed and managed. Christina is the recipient of the 2020 TCCA Young Computer Architect Award, an Intel Rising Star Award, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Research Scholarship, two Google Research Award, and a Facebook Faculty Research Award. Her work has also received 4 IEEE Micro Top Picks awards and several best paper awards. Before joining Cornell, Christina received her PhD from Stanford University. She had previously earned an MS also from Stanford, and a diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. More information can be found at: http://www.csl.cornell.edu/~delimitrou/