Phil Piwonka

Member of the AWS Lambda team

Member of the AWS Lambda team

Member of the Kindle team

Member of the Kindle team

Member of the SQL Server team

• Focused on providing enterprise customers and developers with robust, scalable, and customizable synchronization solutions as a member of the SQL Server and SQL Azure Data Synchronization Team.

• Primary developer on the Database Providers for the Microsoft Sync Framework, an API that enables developers to add peer-to-peer database synchronization capabilities to applications, services and devices.

• Collaborated with external teams to deliver Database Provider integration in Visual Studio 2010 and 2008, enabling configuration of database caching and synchronization from within Visual Studio projects.

• Designed and implemented new Merge Replication features for the SQL Server 2008 release.

• Provided support for customers by working with the Customer Support Team to help diagnose urgent customer reported issues and drive them to resolution.

• Attended multiple conferences such as TechEd and TechReady to interface with customers, collecting feedback and providing guidance.

• Helped on-board new developers by teaching them current implementation and design details, as well as development processes and expectations.

Worked on near-realtime processing systems

• Designed, implemented, documented, and tested mission-critical numerical and clustering algorithms for processing data in a near-realtime high-performance UNIX parallel computing environment.

• Utilized multithreading and shared memory programming models to scale algorithms in order to meet near- realtime processing requirements.

• Wrote analysis tools in C++, Matlab, and Perl to help prototype and validate algorithms.

• Interacted significantly with multiple customer organizations via delivery briefings and working groups.

• Successfully lead several software development tasks.

Creator and sole developer of “Gawker”, an open source application that allows users to create parallel time- lapse movies using video cameras connected over a network.

• Featured on tuaw.com, lifehacker.com, digg.com, makezine.com, macupdate.com, and versiontracker.com.

Five Year Program for Bachelors and Masters Degrees

We describe how specializing for serverless informed the design of Firecracker, and what we learned from seamlessly migrating AWS Lambda customers to Firecracker.

Awarded Best Paper at USENIX ATC'23! - We describe the storage and caching system we built, optimized for delivering container images on-demand, and our experiences designing, building, and operating it at scale. We focus on challenges around security, efficiency, latency, and cost, and how we addressed these challenges in a system that combines caching, deduplication, convergent encryption, erasure coding, and block-level demand loading.

I represented the AWS Lambda engineering team on this livestream celebrating 10 years of the service, talking about how the service thinks about availability and making sure customer workloads of all shapes and sizes get a great experience. We also discussed how Lambda evolved into building and using Firecracker for virtualization and the challenges of doing a large scale migration.