Notes:
In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Peter Alvaro of Disorderly Labs and discuss chaos, failure, academics, and computer science. The topics range from data provenance to fault injection but hinge on how Peter’s LDFI research is impacting the field of chaos engineering. Also, Casey tries to talk Peter into a way to use his research as a way to pull off a bank heist, and of course, James tries to be the voice of reason.
Peter Alvaro
Peter Alvaro is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California Santa Cruz, where he leads the Disorderly Labs research group (disorderlylabs.github.io). His research focuses on using data-centric languages and analysis techniques to build and reason about data-intensive distributed systems, in order to make them scalable, predictable and robust to the failures and nondeterminism endemic to large-scale distribution. Peter earned his PhD at UC Berkeley, where he studied with Joseph M. Hellerstein. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Facebook Research Award, and the UCSC Excellence in Teaching Award.
Keywords and phrases
beacon on the sand dune; Ayn Rand and competitive shrugging, unteachable students, Disorderly Labs, LDFI (Lineage Driven Fault Injection), data provenance, replication, distributed systems, fault injection, simulated bank unauthorized money extraction, baby photos, quote-unquote crime, tenure, fate sharing, Chaos Engineering experts, Jepsen, “unprincipled,” polemic publications, expert-level SREs, Intuition Engineering, West Coast vs East Coast, Maine, cartography, bees, UCSC (the lifestyle choice), conflicts of interest, sand dollars
People in this episode:
- Peter Alvaro (@palvaro)
- Casey Rosenthal (@caseyrosenthal)
- James Wickett (@wickett)