ASPLOS 2014 Keynote

Inside Windows Azure: The Challenges and Opportunities of a Cloud Operating System- Brad Calder, Microsoft (slides)

Abstract:
Cloud operating systems provide on-demand, scalable compute and storage resources. They allow service developers to focus on their business logic by simplifying many portions of their service, including resource management, provisioning, monitoring, and application lifecycle management. This talk describes some of the technical challenges faced, as well as emergent opportunities created, by Microsoft's cloud operating system Windows Azure.

Bio:
Brad Calder is a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft leading the development of Windows Azure Storage. In 2006 he joined Microsoft and started the Windows Azure Storage team. Windows Azure Storage provides massively scalable, durable, and available cloud storage. The service stores trillions of objects and processes millions of requests per second. This allows customers to store and access NoSQL Tables, Blobs, Queues, and VM Disks when using Microsoft's cloud operating system.

Before coming to Microsoft, Brad was a Professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering where he graduated 14 PhD students, published over 100 papers in the areas of systems, architecture and compilers, and was a recipient of an NSF CAREER award. Before joining UC San Diego in 1997, he worked as a Principal Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Lab. He is also a co-founder of two startup companies: Entropia Inc. (high performance computing) and Trace Point Inc. (program analysis tools for x86).

Brad received a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Mathematics from University of Washington in 1991, and his Ph.D. from University of Boulder, Colorado in 1995.

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