Yunong J Xiao's Blog

Yunong J Xiao
Principal Engineer and Architect
San Francisco Bay Area
@yunongx
http://github.com/yunong
http://yunong.io

Summary

I’m an engineering leader with a passion for cloud computing (IaaS, PaaS, FaaS), distributed systems, big data, and security. I have experience leading and delivering successful cross-functional teams and projects.

I lead the FaaS/Serverless platform at Netflix, which powers the next-generation Netflix API. This platform processes and orchestrates all requests from Netflix clients to backend systems — leveraging new technology such as Docker, Node.js, gRPC and Amazon ECS. This effort is a significant cross-functional project which involves orchestration between many teams and stakeholders across Netflix.

I am a seasoned public speaker — having given talks at many industry-leading conferences such as O’Reilly Fluent, QCon, JS Interactive, and Container Camp.

Previously, I was part of the platform team at Amazon Web Services — where we launched services such as AWS IAM and worked on the metering and aggregation platform used by all AWS services. At Joyent, I was part of the core team that built a public cloud (SmartDataCenter) and object store (Manta) from scratch.

I am also the lead maintainer of the open source REST framework Restify.

Experience

Principal Engineer/Architect at Netflix.com

2014 – Present

Currently leading the FaaS/Serverless platform at Netflix, which powers the next-generation Netflix API. This platform processes and orchestrates all requests from Netflix clients to backend systems — leveraging new technology such as Docker, Node.js, and Amazon ECS. This effort is a significant cross-functional project which involves orchestration between many teams and stakeholders. Core technologies used in this stack include AWS, Docker, Node.js, gRPC, ReactiveSocket, RXNetty, and Falcor.

Senior Software Engineer at Joyent.com

2011 – 2014

Launched the Joyent Manta object store and compute service. Manta services I architected, designed, and implemented:

Highly available automated database fail-over system built using Node.js, PostgreSQL, Zookeeper, and ZFS. (github.com/joyent/manatee)
Horizontally scalable authentication service built using Node.js, redis, and LDAP.
Manta metadata partitioning service utilizing Node.js over a custom TCP protocol, built on top of a custom consistent hashing library and LevelDB.
LDAP replication service built with Node.js and LDAP.js

Consulted with the Joyent-sponsored Node.js project lead on features of Node.js.

Senior Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services

July 2009 – October 2011

Launched AWS Identity and Access Management and AWS Multi-Factor Authentication.
Scaled out AWS metering stack from a traditional home grown relational database solution to one built on top of Hadoop that handled an exponentially growing workload with 99.9% up time.

Selected Projects

Restify

Observable REST RPC framework. (8200 stars on Github, used at Netflix, Pinterest, Napster, NPM) (http://restify.com/)

Node-fash

A consistent hashing library for Node.js. (github.com/yunong/node-fash)

Node-zookeeper

A functional Node.js zookeeper client. (github.com/yunong/node-zookeeper)

LDAP Replicator

A pure Node.js implementation of a LDAP replicator. (github.com/yunong/node-ldapjs-sync)

Node-leader

A Node.js leader election library. (github.com/yunong/node-leader)

Selected Talks and Publications

Skills

Operating Systems

Solaris (Illumos, SmartOS), ZFS, Dtrace, Linux

Databases

PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, LeveDB.

Languages

Java, Node.js, C, SQL, bash.

Runtimes

Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Restify.

Software

Docker, Zookeeper, Hadoop, vim.

Education

University of Waterloo
Honours BASc, Computer Engineering, 2009