Guest Lecture: How Does AWS Build a Cloud Service from Scratch?

Guest Speaker: Dr. Chong Tang

Time: Thursday, March 9, 2023. 1:15pm - 2:30pm Central.

Location: Zoom link is posted on Piazza.

For CS4278/5278 students (only apply to students in Dr. Yu Huang's session), you are required to change your Zoom username to "$VUID-$NAME-CS4278" (e.g., huany47-Yu Huang-CS4278).

Abstract

In the talk, Dr. Tang will introduce how AWS builds a cloud service from a practitioner’s perspective. He will talk through the entire product development process, starting with how the product team convinces leadership to approve a new product. Dr. Tang will then discuss how AWS collaborates with customers to gather feature requirements and how an engineering team transforms these requirements into a functional system. Throughout the talk, Dr. Tang will highlight the various tools and mechanisms employed in the process, as well as the best practices used in building a cloud service at the scale of AWS. For example, how to discover bugs in an earlier stage, what are the various standards and metrics used to achieve continuous integration and continuous deployment, and how to make sure the system runs in a stable condition and discover and fix issues before customers notice it.

About Dr. Chong Tang

Dr. Tang is a Software Engineering Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he leads a team of engineers developing a new AWS service specifically designed for the automotive industry. Before joining AWS, Dr. Tang worked at Microsoft, where he worked on the Conversational Language Understanding service. He also worked for Walmart Labs, where he contributed significantly to the development of the next-generation search engine for online grocery shopping. Dr. Tang holds a PhD degree from University of Virginia where he developed algorithms to improve software runtime performance.