Hitesh Ballani Contact Information: 21 Station Road Cambridge CB1 2FB, UK +44 1223 479876

I am a researcher in the Cloud Infrastructure team at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. My research aims to build systems and networks for next-generation data centers. Our current focus is on developing optical technologies for the cloud. Earlier, I graduated from Cornell University where I indulged in follies like Scalable Internet Routing and Network Management.

With our Optics for the Cloud effort (2016-), we are delving deeper into the data center stack. Our team brings together hardware, optics, networking and application-level expertise to take a cross-stack view towards developing optical technologies that could underpin the next-generation of our cloud infrastructure. We also collaborate with several top universities as part of our Optics for the Cloud research alliance.

Broadly, I enjoy working on real-world problems, particularly ones that span technical domains. For example, as part of the Predictable Data Centers project (2010-15), we developed technologies for enabling predictable performance across shared cloud resources like networking and storage. Applying traditional networking ideas to the storage stack was key to a lot of our innovation, leading to the SMB Bandwidth Limiting feature in Windows Server 2012 R2, and inspiring the end-to-end Storage QoS feature in Windows Server 2016. This post discusses our journey from whiteboard discussions to a shipping product.

Projects

• Project Sirius: Ultra-fast optical switching for data centers
• Iris: Optics for the regional network and the WAN

In the past, I have worked on the following projects:

• Predictable Data Centers (PDC)
• Software-Defined Storage (SDS)
• Rack-scale Computing
• Virtual Aggregation (ViAggre)
• Complexity Oblivious Network Management (CONMan)
• Proxy IP Anycast Service (PIAS)
• Forages into topics pertaining to network security such as DoS attacks, Prefix hijacks, etc.

Publications

• System Demonstration of Nanosecond Wavelength Switching with Burst-mode PAM4 Transceiver
  Kai Shi, Sophie Lange, Istvan Haller, Daniel Cletheroe, Raphael Behrendt, Benn Thomsen, Fotini Karinou, Krzysztof Jozwik, Paolo Costa, and Hitesh Ballani
  European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC 2019 Post-deadline Paper), Dublin, Ireland, September 2019.   [abstract, pdf]
• Shoal: A Network Architecture for Disaggregated Racks
  Vishal Shrivastav, Asaf Valadarsky, Hitesh Ballani, Paolo Costa, Ki Suh Lee, Han Wang, Rachit Agarwal, and Hakim Weatherspoon
  USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'19), February 2019.   [abstract, pdf]
• Sub-Nanosecond Clock and Data Recovery in an Optically-Switched Data Centre Network
  Kari Clark, Hitesh Ballani, Polina Bayvel, Daniel Cletheroe, Thomas Gerard, Istvan Haller, Krzysztof Jozwik, Kai Shi, Benn Thomsen, Philip Watts, Hugh Williams, Paolo Costa, Georgios Zervas and Zhixin Liu
  European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC 2018 Post-deadline paper), Rome, Italy, September 2018.   [abstract, pdf]
• Bridging the Last Mile for Optical Switching in Data Centers
  Hitesh Ballani, Paolo Costa, Istvan Haller, Krzysztof Jozwik, Kai Shi, Benn Thomsen, and Hugh Williams
  Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2018, San Diego, CA, March 2018.   [abstract, pdf]
• Hybrid Wavelength Switched-TDMA High Port Count All-Optical Data Centre Switch
  Adam Funnel, Kai Shi, Paolo Costa, Philip Watts , Hitesh Ballani, and Benn Thomsen
  IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology, October 2017.   [abstract, pdf]
• High Port Count Hybrid Wavelength Switched TDMA (WS-TDMA) Optical Switch for Data Centers
  Adam Funnell, Joshua Benjamin, Hitesh Ballani, Paolo Costa, Philip Watts, and Benn Thomsen
  Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2016, Anaheim, CA, March 2016.   [abstract, pdf]
• Enabling End-host Network Functions
  Hitesh Ballani, Paolo Costa, Christos Gkantsidis, Matthew P. Grosvenor, Thomas Karagiannis, Lazaros Koromilas, and Greg O'Shea
  ACM SIGCOMM 2015, London, UK, August 2015.   [abstract, pdf]
• R2C2: A Network Stack for Rack-scale Computers
  Paolo Costa, Hitesh Ballani, Kaveh Razavi, and Ian Kash
  ACM SIGCOMM 2015, London, UK, August 2015.   [abstract, pdf]
• Silo: Predictable Message Latency in the Cloud
  Keon Jang, Justine Sherry, Hitesh Ballani, and Toby Moncaster
  ACM SIGCOMM 2015, London, UK, August 2015.   [abstract, pdf]
• End-to-end Performance Isolation through Virtual Datacenters
  Sebastian Angel, Hitesh Ballani, Thomas Karagiannis, Greg O'Shea, and Eno Thereska
  USENIX OSDI 2014, Broomfield, CO, October 2014.   [abstract, pdf]
• Decentralized Task-aware Scheduling for Data Center Networks
  Fahad R Dogar, Thomas Karagiannis, Hitesh Ballani, and Ant Rowstron
  ACM SIGCOMM 2014, Chicago, IL, August 2014.   [abstract, pdf]
• Rethinking the Network Stack for Rack-scale Computers
  Paolo Costa, Hitesh Ballani and Dushyanth Narayanan
  6th Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing
  HotCloud 2014, Philadelphia, PA, June 2014.   [pdf]
• IOFlow: A Software-Defined Storage Architecture
  Eno Thereska, Hitesh Ballani, Greg O'Shea, Thomas Karagiannis, Antony Rowstron, Tom Talpey, Richard Black, Timothy Zhu
  ACM SOSP 2013, Farmington, PA, November 2013.   [abstract, pdf]
• Towards Efficient Traffic-analysis Resistant Anonymity Networks
  Steven LeBlond, David Choffnes, Wenxuan Zhou, Peter Druschel, Hitesh Ballani, and Paul Francis
  ACM SIGCOMM 2013, Hong Kong, China, August 2013.   [abstract, pdf]
• Chatty Tenants and the Cloud Network Sharing Problem
  Hitesh Ballani, Keon Jang, Thomas Karagiannis, Changhoon Kim, Dinan Gunawardena, and Greg O'Shea
  USENIX NSDI 2013, Lombard, IL, April 2013.   [abstract, pdf]
• Bridging the Tenant-Provider Gap in Cloud Services
  Virajith Jalaparti, Hitesh Ballani, Paolo Costa, Thomas Karagiannis, and Ant Rowstron
  ACM SOCC 2012, San Jose, CA, October 2012.   [abstract, pdf]
• The Price Is Right: Towards Location-independent Costs in Datacenters
  Hitesh Ballani, Paolo Costa, Thomas Karagiannis, and Ant Rowstron
  10th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
  HotNets 2011, Cambridge, MA, November 2011.   [pdf]
• Towards Predictable Datacenter Networks
  Hitesh Ballani, Paolo Costa, Thomas Karagiannis and Ant Rowstron
  ACM SIGCOMM 2011, Toronto, Canada, August 2011.   [abstract, pdf]
• Better Never than Late: Meeting Deadlines in Datacenter Networks
  Christopher Wilson, Hitesh Ballani, Thomas Karagiannis and Ant Rowstron
  ACM SIGCOMM 2011, Toronto, Canada, August 2011.   [abstract, pdf] (Honorable Mention Award)
• Location, Location, Location! Modeling Data Proximity in the Cloud
  Birjodh Tiwana, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Marcos Aguilera, Hitesh Ballani and Z. Morley Mao
  9th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
  HotNets 2010, Monterey, Canada, October 2010.   [pdf]
• Locating Prefix Hijackers using LOCK
  Tongqing Qiu, Lusheng Ji, Dan Pei, Jia Wang, Jun Xu and Hitesh Ballani
  USENIX Security Symposium 2009, Montreal, Canada, August 2009.   [pdf]
• Making Routers Last Longer with ViAggre
  Hitesh Ballani, Paul Francis, Tuan Cao and Jia Wang
  USENIX NSDI 2009, Boston, MA, April 2009.   [pdf, bibtex]
  talk slides (pdf)
  
• Fault Management Using the CONMan Abstraction
  Hitesh Ballani and Paul Francis
  IEEE INFOCOM 2009, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 2009.   [pdf, bibtex]
• ViAggre: Making Routers Last Longer!
  Hitesh Ballani, Paul Francis, Tuan Cao and Jia Wang
  7th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
  HotNets 2008, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, October 2008.   [pdf, bibtex]
  talk slides (pdf)
  
• Mitigating DNS DoS Attacks
  Hitesh Ballani and Paul Francis
  ACM CCS 2008, Alexandria, VA, October 2008.   [pdf, bibtex]
  talk slides (pdf)
  
• CONMan: A Step Towards Network Manageability
  Hitesh Ballani and Paul Francis
  ACM SIGCOMM 2007, Kyoto, Japan, August 2007.   [pdf, bibtex]
  talk slides (pdf)
  
• A Study of Prefix Hijacking and Interception in the Internet
  Hitesh Ballani, Paul Francis and Xinyang Zhang
  ACM SIGCOMM 2007, Kyoto, Japan, August 2007.   [pdf, bibtex]
  talk slides (pdf)
  
• A Simple Approach to DNS DoS Mitigation
  Hitesh Ballani and Paul Francis
  5th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
  HotNets 2006, Irvine, CA, November 2006.   [pdf, bibtex]
  talk slides (pdf)
  
• A Measurement-based Deployment Proposal for IP Anycast
  Hitesh Ballani, Paul Francis and Sylvia Ratnasamy
  ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference
  IMC 2006, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 2006.   [pdf, bibtex] (Awarded Best Paper)
  talk slides (pdf)
  
• CONMan - Taking the Complexity out of Network Management
  Hitesh Ballani and Paul Francis
  ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet Network Management
  INM 2006, Pisa, Italy, September 2006.   [pdf, bibtex]
  talk slides (pdf)
  
• Off by Default!
  Hitesh Ballani, Yatin Chawathe, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Timothy Roscoe, and Scott Shenker
  4th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
  HotNets 2005, College Park, MD, November 2005.   [pdf, bibtex]
  talk slides (pdf)
  
• Towards a global IP Anycast service
  Hitesh Ballani and Paul Francis
  ACM SIGCOMM 2005, Philadelphia, PA, September 2005.   [pdf, bibtex]
  talk slides (pdf)
  
• Towards a Deployable IP Anycast Service
  Hitesh Ballani and Paul Francis
  1st USENIX Workshop on Real, Large Distributed Systems
  WORLDS 2004, San Francisco, CA, December 2004.   [pdf, bibtex]
  talk slides (pdf)