Yunong J Xiao
Engineering Executive
San Francisco Bay Area
@yunongx
http://yunong.io

Summary

Seasoned engineering executive with deep technical expertise in cloud computing and distributed systems. Most recently I have been focused on building the next generation of cloud: cloud native. This includes serverless computing, containers, service mesh, and microservices. I have experience building, leading, and delivering successful cross-functional teams and projects.

I am currently the General Manager of the Tencent Cloud Middleware division, with a team of 250. I own 3 main product lines, Serverless, Microservices, and Devops.

Previously 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 keynoted at many industry-leading conferences such as Kubecon, O’Reilly Fluent, and QCon.

Earlier, 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.

Experience

General Manager/Chief Architect at Tencent Cloud

2019 – Present

As the general manager of the Tencent Cloud Middleware division, I own 3 main product lines, Serverless, Microservices, and Devops.

  • Grew the team from 40 engineers to over 250
  • Improved the Tencent Serverless product to third in the 2019 Forrester wave, beating out Google and Alibaba
  • Led the exclusive strategic partnership with serverless.com and Tencent Cloud
  • Led and oversaw the acquisition of coding.net, a devops focused startup that became the Tencent Cloud devops product
  • Launched the first serverless cloud SQL product in industry
  • Support over 1 million serverless customers

Principal Engineer/Architect at Netflix.com

2014 – 2018

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, 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

Senior Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services

July 2009 – October 2011

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

Education

University of Waterloo
Honours BASc, Computer Engineering, 2009