Nikita Lazarev Passes His Thesis Defense!

Nikita’s thesis, Taming Data Movement Overheads in Latency-Critical Cloud Services , presents a bold rethinking of how to address one of the most pressing bottlenecks in modern cloud infrastructure: data movement. His work spans three key domains—microservices, serverless computing, and realtime cloud-native systems—delivering impactful systems that push the boundaries of cloud performance.

Notable contributions include Dagger, a high-performance communication layer for cloud microservices; Sabre, a fast, compression-based cold-start optimizer for serverless platforms; and Slingshot, a pioneering infrastructure that brings fault tolerance and low-latency disaggregation to real-time workloads such as vRAN.

Nikita’s research has been featured in top-tier venues like ASPLOS, and his work stands at the intersection of systems innovation and real-world cloud challenges. His vision and technical depth have shaped a roadmap for next-generation cloud services.

Congratulations, Dr. Lazarev! We can’t wait to see what you accomplish next.