Ben Hindman, Founder of Reboot.dev

Ben is a real OG when it comes to distributed systems. He is the creator of Mesos, a pioneering orchestration framework that was used to power Twitter and Apple at scale. I’d first heard about Ben from Marius Eriksen, who used it at Twitter to build a series of workflows and functional concepts, most famously, Your Server is a Function.

Ben proceeded to cofound Mesosphere, that paved the way for Kubernetes. The ambition to structure complex workflows in rigorous ways was there, with DCOS, a Data Center Operating System. And Ben has a new startup of his own, Reboot. It tackles the problem of building reliable distributed systems from the developer’s angle. Ben gave a talk at the Summit posing the question of microservices often being transactionally unsound, and very hard to reason about to prove soundness.

Reboot, and this talk, is an answer to that question.