Johann
Schleier-Smith


entrepreneur or scholar?

About Me

I have been a builder all my life. Those who know me know 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 work with many intelligent 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 social networking was a huge thrill, as was building a business; Tagged was the first social network to become profitable and, along with the hi5 brand, grew to over $50M in annual revenue before merging with The Meet Group (NASDAQ:MEET) in 2017. Our social graph reached over 300 million people and helped our members develop countless personal relationships.

Though I was interested in computers early on and learned FOR loops before basic English grammar, my focus shifted to physics and mathematics as my academic training accelerated. Physics was my focus for over a decade through high school, college, and graduate school. I appreciated the way of thinking that physics teaches, and I thoroughly enjoyed learning from some of the world's best experimentalists and theorists. Physics came to define my identity—and still forms a part of it.

Now that my final degree is a PhD in computer science, I have reactivated part of my old identity—I am undoubtedly a computer scientist.

Still, the computer science problems that appeal to me most are those with a physics flavor, for example, the flows in systems and networking or the fundamental trade-offs in distributed systems.

I'm a lot of things, a little of everything in my past, plus my passion for the future. I'm a parent and, when time permits, an athlete who loves running, rowing, or skiing. I'm also an economics enthusiast, an art collector, and a food connoisseur. At heart, I'm an optimist, an explorer, and, of course, a builder.

What I am building now

Today, I'm excited to be building CrystalDB, a company motivated by practical problems I saw in the industry and guided by the insights I gained in academia.

CrystalDB ensures operational excellence for PostgreSQL, the world's most popular and advanced open-source database.

It automates the complex and error-prone database configuration and tuning process, helping developers and operators unlock PostgreSQL's full potential without becoming database experts.

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

Keeping up with the work 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]
June 1, 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.
May 1, 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.
July 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.
January 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.
May 7, 2017
ReStream: Accelerating Backtesting and Stream Replay with Serial-Equivalent Parallel Processing | Johann Schleier-Smith, Joseph M. Hellerstein. SoCC. [slides]
October 6, 2016
An Architecture for Agile Machine Learning in Real-Time Applications | Johann Schleier-Smith. KDD. [slides]
August 10, 2015

Preprints, Technical Reports and Workshop Papers

Understanding and Exploring Serverless Cloud Computing | Johann Schleier-Smith. Technical Report.
December 30, 2022
A FaaS File System for Serverless Computing | Johann Schleier-Smith, Leonhard Holz, Nathan Pemberton, Joseph M. Hellerstein.
September 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.
June 1, 2020
The Serverless Data Center: Hardware Disaggregation Meets Serverless Computing | Nathan Pemberton, Johann Schleier-Smith. The First Workshop on Resource Disaggregation.
April 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.
February 10, 2019
Serverless Foundations for Elastic Database Systems | Johann Schleier-Smith. CIDR Extended Abstract.
January 15, 2019

Talks and Invited Articles

NEW Self-Managing Databases—If Not Now Then When? | Johann Schleier-Smith. Postgres Conference. [slides]
April 19, 2024
A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing | Johann Schleier-Smith. Serverlessconf NYC.
November 7, 2019
A File System for Serverless Computing | Johann Schleier-Smith. HPTS.
November 5, 2019
Architecting for Data Science | Johann Schleier-Smith. O'Reilly Software Architecture. [slides]
March 19, 2015
Agile Machine Learning for Real-time Recommender Systems | Johann Schleier-Smith. MLConf. [video]
November 14, 2014
Using Big Data To Solve Social Discovery's Relevance Problem | Johann Schleier-Smith.
January 9, 2013
Social Media Analytics Using Greenplum's Data Computing Appliance | Johann Schleier-Smith. O'Reilly Strata.
February 2, 2011