Compute

Turning idle machines into elastic execution: serverless analytics, fair scheduling across tenants, and running heavy work cheaply on reclaimable spot fleets.

Explainers

• Design a Sandboxed Code-Execution Service — Run code an LLM wrote seconds ago, for thousands of mutually suspicious tenants, without ever letting one read another’s files or take the host down — the isolation spectrum from a shared process to a hardware-walled microVM, warm pools and snapshot/restore, cgroup limits, and network policy, priced in real milliseconds and megabytes from the Firecracker and gVisor docs.
• The Shuffle: How a Cluster Moves a Join — A join is trivial once the matching rows share a machine. The shuffle is the all-to-all network move that gets them there — repartition every row by a hash of its key, and everything hard follows: why it dominates query time, why one hot key strands a straggler while the fleet idles, and how adaptive splits, salting, and broadcast joins break it.
• Design a Multi-Tenant Query Engine on Object Storage — Thousands of customers, ten thousand queries at once, sub-second dashboards next to multi-hour batch jobs — all on discounted machines the cloud can take back at any moment. Split the coordinating brain from the number-crunching muscle, schedule fairly, and make a query survive its own workers being yanked mid-flight.