Building scalable and flexible cluster managers using declarative programming

Modern cluster managers routinely grapple with hard combinatorial optimization problems, such as policy-based load balancing, placement, scheduling, and configuration. Implementing ad-hoc heuristics to solve these problems is notoriously hard to do, making it challenging to evolve the system over time and add new features.

In this talk, Lalith will present Declarative Cluster Managers (DCM), a general approach for building cluster managers that makes them performant and easily extensible. With DCM, developers specify the cluster manager's behavior using a high-level declarative language like SQL and let a compiler take care of generating an efficient implementation. Speaker will show how DCM significantly lowers the barrier to building scalable and extensible cluster managers, in the context of some real-world systems like Kubernetes.

The talk will be broadly accessible and delivered in a tutorial style. There are no prerequisites.