DATE: Thursday, March 23, 2017
TIME: 12:00 - 1:00 pm
PLACE: RMCIC - 4th floor (Panther Hollow Room)

SPEAKER: Swami Sivasubramanian, Amazon Web Services

TITLE: From Distributed Systems to Deep Learning: Lessons learnt in building large scale cloud services

ABSTRACT:
In AWS, we are running large scale cloud services that are the core platform for Amazon.com and millions of AWS customers. Building and operating these systems at scale has taught us several lessons and best practices: 1, how does one determine what they are building is right for their customer 2, how does one architect for scale and ensure correctness, 3, how does one test these large scale systems and 4, how do you deploy systems globally, etc.? Throughout this presentation, I will talk through these learnings as they apply to various systems I have built (such as DynamoDB, Paxos based systems, AI services like Rekognition). We will finish the talk with discussion on how AWS is exposing AI technologies to our customers to drive the development of cutting edge technology solutions.

BIO:
Swami is VP in AWS in charge of all Amazon AI and Machine learning initiatives. For more details on Amazon AI: https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-ai/ and https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/ai/

Previously, Swami was the General Manager of NoSQL and some big data services in AWS. He managed the engineering, product management and operations for core AWS database services that are the foundational building blocks for AWS: DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache (in-memory engines), Amazon QuickSight, SimpleDB and a few other big data services in the works. Swami has been awarded more than 200 patents, authored around 40 referred scientific papers and journals, and participate in several academic circles and conferences.

In addition to these, he also built more than 15 AWS Cloud Services like CloudFront, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon's Paxos based lock service, original Amazon Dynamo etc. He was also one of the main authors for Amazon Dynamo paper (http://bit.ly/1mDs0Yh) along with Werner Vogels. Amazon Dynamo now is the foundation for many other NoSQL systems like Riak, Cassandra and Voldemort.

VISITOR HOST: Majd Sakr (msakr@cs.cmu.edu)

SDI / ISTC SEMINAR QUESTIONS?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/