Gopal Kakivaya is a Distinguished Engineer working on Microsoft SQL Azure, part of Microsoft’s cloud-computing initiative. He has spent well over a decade working at the forefront of Microsoft’s distributed-computing efforts. The culmination of this work has been leading the development and successful deployment of a ground-breaking distributed computation fabric. This distributed fabric is the foundation on which Microsoft’s SQL Azure and distributed cache are built.

With the distributed fabric platform, Kakivaya has demonstrated how to combine the scale and decentralization characteristics of edge (P2P) networks with the consistent semantics demanded by the datacenter networks. That helps create a scale-free self-healing mesh of commodity computers that can extend from the cloud to the edge. This platform has solved many challenging and important distributed systems problems around reliable failure detection, perfect leader election, consensus, failover, lookup consistency, distributed caching, self-adjusting spanning trees, and reliable unicast and multicast communications.

Prior to working on the distributed fabric in the SQL Azure team, Kakivaya contributed to a number of Microsoft’s distributed computing technologies. These include working as a founding member of the eHome division in 2001. There, he led the development of a home platform that could seamlessly extend datacenter networks into edge networks for improved delivery of consumer services such as VOIP and video content such as IPTV and DVR-in-the-sky. Kakivaya also served as a a member of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) team in 1999, where he designed and led the development of a number of .NET framework features such as transparent proxies, .NET-Remoting, various locking primitives, class-initialization semantics, and asynchronous design pattern. During this time, he authored the original SOAP specification that became the basis for modern interoperable web services. And, as a member of the Windows COM/DCOM team until 1998, he designed and implemented RPC communication channels, data/interface marshaling, and call interception mechanism to support features such as transaction enlistment, propagation, and completion.

Kakivaya has already received more than 25 patents on different aspects of computing.

Before joining Microsoft in May 1996, Kakivaya earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from North Carolina State University. His research focused on verification of software systems and its applications. Prior to his graduate work at North Carolina State, he worked in the Indian software industry for about six years after obtaining his engineering education at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras and Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati.

Kakivaya lives in Sammamish, Wash. with his wife and two children.