Johann
Schleier-Smith


entrepreneur or scholar?

Selected Papers and Publications

My most recent writing and speaking focuses on serverless computing, which makes cloud computing easier and more powerful. I also maintain interests in machine learning and data science.

Serverless Literature Guide

NEW Keeping up with the being done in serverless computing can be overwhelming. The Serverless Literature Guide aims to provide a guide to the literature. Contributions are welcome!

Conference and Journal Publications

The RESTless Cloud | Nathan Pemberton, Johann Schleier-Smith, Joseph E. Gonzalez. HotOS. [video]
06.01.2021
What Serverless Computing Is and Should Become: The Next Phase of Cloud Computing | Johann Schleier-Smith, Vikram Sreekanti, Anurag Khandelwal, Joao Carreira, Neeraja J. Yadwadkar, Raluca Ada Popa, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica, David A. Patterson. Communications of the ACM.
05.01.2021
Cloudburst: Stateful Functions-as-a-Service. | V. Sreekanti, C. Wu, X. C. Lin, Johann Schleier-Smith, J. M. Faleiro, J. E. Gonzalez, J. M. Hellerstein, A. Tumanov. VLDB 2020.
07.24.2020
Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back | Joseph M. Hellerstein, Jose Faleiro, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Johann Schleier-Smith, Vikram Sreekanti, Alexey Tumanov and Chenggang Wu. CIDR.
01.14.2019
Real-Time Machine Learning: The Missing Pieces | Robert Nishihara, Philipp Moritz, Stephanie Wang, Alexey Tumanov, William Paul, Johann Schleier-Smith, Richard Liaw, Mehrdad Niknami, Michael I. Jordan, Ion Stoica. HotOS.
05.07.2017
ReStream: Accelerating Backtesting and Stream Replay with Serial-Equivalent Parallel Processing | Johann Schleier-Smith, Joseph M. Hellerstein. SoCC. [slides]
10.06.2016

Preprints, Technical Reports and Workshop Papers

NEW Understanding and Exploring Serverless Cloud Computing | Johann Schleier-Smith. PhD Dissertation.
12.30.2022
A FaaS File System for Serverless Computing | Johann Schleier-Smith, Leonhard Holz, Nathan Pemberton, Joseph M. Hellerstein.
09.16.2020
CoVista: A Unified View on Privacy Sensitive Mobile Contact Tracing | David Culler, Prabal Dutta, Gabe Fierro, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Nathan Pemberton, Johann Schleier-Smith, K. Shankari, Alvin Wan, Thomas Zachariah. Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Engineering.
06.01.2020
The Serverless Data Center: Hardware Disaggregation Meets Serverless Computing | Nathan Pemberton, Johann Schleier-Smith. The First Workshop on Resource Disaggregation.
04.13.2019
Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing | Eric Jonas, Johann Schleier-Smith, Vikram Sreekanti, Chia-Che Tsai, Anural Khandelwal, Qifan Pu, Vaishaal Shankar, Joao Menezes Carreira, Karl Krauth, Neeraja Yadwadkar, Joseph Gonzalez, Raluca Ada Popa, Ion Stoica, David A. Patterson. Technical Report.
02.10.2019
Serverless Foundations for Elastic Database Systems | Johann Schleier-Smith. CIDR Extended Abstract.
01.15.2019

Talks and Invited Articles

A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing | Johann Schleier-Smith. Serverlessconf NYC.
11.07.2019
A File System for Serverless Computing | Johann Schleier-Smith. HPTS.
11.05.2019
Architecting for Data Science | Johann Schleier-Smith. O'Reilly Software Architecture. [slides]
03.19.2015
Agile Machine Learning for Real-time Recommender Systems | Johann Schleier-Smith. MLConf. [video]
11.14.2014
Social Media Analytics Using Greenplum's Data Computing Appliance | Johann Schleier-Smith. O'Reilly Strata.
02.02.2011

About Me

I have been a builder all my life. Those who know me well know that I'm often happiest when assembling or creating. Over the years I've been lucky to gain access to bigger and better toys and tools, and to work with a lot of smart and fun people.

As an entrepreneur I'm most proud of if(we), the company I co-founded with my long-time friend Greg Tseng. Being part of the birth of the social web was a huge thrill, as was building a business; Tagged was the first social network to become profitable.

With the hi5 merger we created a consolidated a social graph counting over 300 million people, and helped our members develop countless personal relationships. Looking ahead, I'm excited by our conviction that the social internet isn't yet fully figured out, and by the new ideas our team is pursuing.

Once upon a time I was known first as a programmer—I was building text-based adventure games using BASIC when my English writing was limited to words of three characters or less. I'm almost entirely an autodidact in this area, and I've set aside coding in favor of management many times, yet I keep coming back to it and I love it.

In graduate school (the first time around), college, and half of high school, I was most definitely a physicist. Understanding how the world works appeals to my curiosity, I quickly appreciated the way of thinking that physics teaches, and I thoroughly enjoyed learning from some of the world's best experimentalists and theorists.

Today I'm a lot of things, a little of everything in my past, plus my passion for the future. I'm parent, when time permits an athlete who loves to run, row, or ski. I'm also an economics enthusiast, an art collector, a food connoisseur. I'm an optimist, an explorer, and I'm going to be whatever is next.