Michal Szymaniak

  Contact:

The best way to reach me is by email: my_first_name @ my_last_name . net

  Resume:

..can be found here. For my current work, check out the Genesis primer.

I have been building globally distributed systems since 2007. Google Spanner is known best across the industry, while Dropbox Magic Pocket and Facebook fleet-wide overhauls were major milestones in their respective environments.

I am currently working on Genesis, which is a low-level data store for infrastructure and database projects. It combines replication, sharding, and change notification in a single platform designed for high availability, "infinite" scalability, and easy long-term maintenance.

Some examples of how Genesis can be used include:


• zero-dependency metadata store for low-level infrastructure,
• massively sharded NoSQL for online services,
• backend for a higher-level data store that needs replication and/or sharding,
• highly-available storage platform across multiple physical locations,
• replacement for FoundationDB, to adopt a multi-master architecture for higher scalability, RocksDB/gRPC/C++ for easier maintenance, and a symmetric production setup for smooth operations.

You can find out more about the technology behind Genesis here.

PhD Thesis:

• Latency-Driven Replication for Globally Distributed Systems.
  Advisors: Prof. Maarten van Steen and Prof. Guillaume Pierre.
  
  

Publications:

Journal:

• Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database,
  ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Vol. 31, No. 8, August 2013.
• Practical Large-Scale Latency Estimation,
  Elsevier's Computer Networks, Vol. 52, No. 7, April 2008.
• Enabling Service Adaptability with Versatile Anycast,
  Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, Vol. 19, No. 13, September 2007.
• Latency-Driven Replica Placement (Extended Version),
  Invited Article, IPSJ Journal, Vol. 47, No. 8, August 2006.
• Replication for Web Hosting Systems,
  ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 36, No. 3, September 2004.

Conference:

• Versatile Anycasting with Mobile IPv6,
  Proceedings of the 2006 ICST International Workshop on Advanced Architectures and Algorithms
  for Internet Delivery and Applications (AAA-IDEA2006), Pisa, Italy, October 2006 [slides]
• Latency-Driven Replica Placement,
  Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT2005),
  Trento, Italy, February 2005 (Best Paper Award) [slides]
• Scalable Cooperative Latency Estimation,
  Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS2004),
  Newport Beach, CA, USA, July 2004 [slides]
• NetAirt: A Flexible Redirection System for Apache,
  Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference on WWW/Internet (ICWI2003),
  Algarve, Portugal, November 2003 [slides]

Other:

• From Web Servers to Ubiquitous Content Delivery,
  Book chapter in Global Data Management, IOS Press, July 2006.
• A Single-Homed Ad Hoc Distributed Server,
  Technical Report IR-CS-013, Vrije Universiteit, March 2005.
• A DNS-based Client Redirector for the Apache HTTP Server,
  Master's thesis, Vrije Universiteit / Warsaw University, June 2002.

Talks:

• Ad Hoc Distributed Servers,
  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, February 2006.
• Stable Node Positioning,
  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, November 2005.
• Deciding on Satellite Placement,
  Google Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA, October 2005.
• Latency-Driven Replica Placement,
  The 11th Annual ASCI Conference, Heijen, The Netherlands, June 2005.
• Wide-Area Handoffs in Ad Hoc Distributed Servers,
  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, April 2005.
• SCoLE: Scalable Cooperative Latency Estimation,
  The 10th Annual ASCI Conference, Port Zelande, The Netherlands, June 2004.
• Streaming Content Delivery in Peer-to-Peer Networks,
  Technical University Delft, June 2004.
• Principles of Distributed Redirection,
  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, February 2004.
• SCoLE: Scalable Cooperative Latency Estimation (RIPE TTM version),
  RIPE-47 Meeting, Amsterdam, January 2004.
• NetAirt: a DNS-based Redirection System for Apache,
  The 9th Annual ASCI Conference, Heijen, The Netherlands, June 2003.
• A Framework for Web Replica Hosting Systems,
  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, February 2003.
• Communication Between Uncoupled Processes,
  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, February 2002.

NetAirt:

• ..was my master's project; it is the redirecting subsystem of Globule.
• The name NetAirt comes from the old Scottish word airt, which means direction, or to direct, to guide.