Member of Technical Staff, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center — serverless, LLMs, and cloud-native business applications.
I am a Member of Technical Staff in Cloud-native AI Platform at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. My main topics of interest are AI, eventing, and serverless computing — using them to build delightful experiences for business users in business applications and workflows. I co-organize the International Workshop on AI and Serverless (WoAIS), previously the International Workshop on Serverless Computing (WoSC); talk slides are linked from serverlesscomputing.org/workshops.
The seams are the trap: agent fleets from CNCF parts you already have
Aleksander Slominski, Mariusz Sabath · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026, Salt Lake City · November 2026
Every vendor is shipping an agent platform. You probably don’t need one — what you need to know is how to compose the CNCF projects you already are running to get headless agents running safely in your clusters. We identify challenges: cold-start identity gap (the agent egresses before SPIRE issues an SVID), trust-scope drift (egress allowlist decided at deploy, stale by wake), unverified delivery (the event broker hands off events before signature check), and unbound audit (completion not chained back to the signed wake). We walk through one reference pattern: KEDA scaling deployments from queue depth, signed CloudEvents (SPIFFE source + JWS) as the wake contract, sidecar policy reading SVIDs at runtime, and the event broker log as tamper-evident audit. In a live demo we show: zero agent replicas → signed task event to agent wake → blocked egress on a wrong-scope call → completion bound to the wake event → scale to zero when agents are idle.
Publish-subscribe with large language models: improving expressiveness with natural language and generated custom notifications
Middleware 2023 · December 2023
Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised the expectations of users to be able to use natural language (NL) to interact with computer systems such as publish/subscribe systems. We introduce a design that extends existing pub/sub paradigms by adding support for NL queries to subscribe to publications of unstructured text messages. To make the system easier for users our system can also customize the notifications, using LLMs to generate targeted NL answers from the matching publications.
Keynote: Rise of containers and serverless — past, present and future
The Fifth International Workshop on Container Technologies and Container Clouds · December 2019
Containers and serverless computing are rising in interest and some would say are on top of the hype curve of the IT industry. The question remains: what is real and what is marketing? We look at what problems serverless computing is solving and how containers are key enabling technology. Why should serverless be an important topic for researchers? Why do containers matter for serverless? Why does serverless matter for containers? What is the future of containers and serverless, and how does it relate to the future of computing?
Paul Castro, Vatche Ishakian, Vinod Muthusamy, Aleksander Slominski · Communications of the ACM, Vol. 62 No. 12, pp. 44–54 · December 2019 · DOI:10.1145/3368454
Serverless computing — an emerging cloud-native paradigm for the deployment of applications and services — represents an evolution in cloud application development, programming models, abstractions, and platforms. It promises real pay-as-you-go billing (with millisecond granularity) with no waste of resources, and lowers the bar for developers by asking them to delegate all their operational complexity and scalability to the cloud provider. Delivering on these promises comes at the expense of restricting functionality. In this article we provide an overview of serverless computing, its evolution, general architecture, key characteristics and use cases that made it an attractive option for application development. Based on discussions with academics and industry experts during a series of organized serverless computing workshops (WoSC), we also identify the technical challenges and open problems.
The future of computing is boring (and that is exciting!)
Aleksander Slominski, Vinod Muthusamy, Vatche Isahagian · IC2E 2019 Future Computing Track, pp. 97–101 · June 2019 · DOI:10.1109/IC2E.2019.00023
We see a trend where computing becomes a metered utility similar to how the electric grid evolved. Initially electricity was generated locally but economies of scale (and standardization) made it more efficient and economical to have utility companies managing the electric grid. Similar developments can be seen in computing where scientific grids paved the way for commercial cloud computing offerings. However, in our opinion, that evolution is far from finished and in this paper we bring forward the remaining challenges and propose a vision for the future of computing. In particular we focus on diverging trends in the costs of computing and developer time, which suggests that future computing architectures will need to optimize for developer time.
