Suppose  you and a couple of friends who just met at a cocktail party want to  build  a scalable  distributed application, at the level of Google or Facebook. Where do you start?

In  this talk,  I  will present  programming  abstractions for  building highly-distributed applications.  I will start by  presenting composable lightweight agents -- each agent  is responsible for its own distributed state,   can   be   configured  (e.g.,   fault-tolerance,   consistency) independently and  communicates using  stateless, RESTful  interfaces. I will then  talk about  grouping operations using  a fully-decentralized, scalable  transactional protocol,  and touch  upon different  trade-offs this design  allows users to  make. I will  finish by explaining  how we envision bringing  these and  other abstractions down  at the  OS level, forming a clean-slate  distributed foundation upon which  to build cloud applications