Early in my research career, I had a chance to work with some of the best system researchers1 in the world on a number of really interesting system designs. One of the enjoyable aspects of research was the particular process used by researchers (particularly in the SOSP/OSDI community) to come up with novel yet practical designs. This design process can be characterized as “fighting complexity with abstraction”: in any complex environment, how do you corral that complexity into cleanly defined boxes (or more technically, abstractions) and then divide functionality across these boxes? This sounds like hyperbole, but I’ve been quite lucky when it comes to mentors; put together, my advisors at Cornell and colleagues at the now-defunct MSR Silicon Valley lab were responsible for inventing much of modern distributed computing over a span of five decades, but that’s a topic for another post. ↩