Brian Kroth

About

Brian is a self-professed all-around geek with a particular love for all things systems, databases, and abstract algebra.  He fundamentally wants to understand how things work in order to help build better versions in a scientific way.

At Microsoft, Brian’s current investigations include things like resource management and auto-tuning for SQL Server and the Azure DB platform, optimizing software for storage performance, especially with NVMe based flash (opens in new tab) and recent persistent memory (opens in new tab) advances, learned indices (opens in new tab), machine learning inspired systems optimization (opens in new tab)

Brian received a Bachelor in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (opens in new tab) before going on to obtain a Masters in Computer Science at the same.

During that time, he also worked with various groups at the university in a professional capacity; designing, building, and maintaining a variety of distributed, database, virtualization, networking, and storage systems in support of the instruction and research missions of the university.  He feels privileged to be able to continue his collaborations (opens in new tab) with Professors like Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau and their students at UW-Madison.

His professional work encompasses reproducibility through automation and design tuning through data driven analysis.  His research approach is a blend of full stack appreciation while looking at a wide range of systems problems including resource management, scheduling, distributed storage, virtualization, and networking (specifically focused for data management systems), coupled with a burgeoning interest in adding a mathematical focus to these areas through machine learning.  Brian likes to understand how things work in order to help build better versions in a scientific way. He hopes in the future to apply some of that systems approach to the machine learning applications as well.

Brian enjoys the unique atmosphere at GSL – being at the cross section of industry and academia.  He enjoys working with students and having the ability to have larger impact through an organization like Azure Data and beyond.