Intermediate Representations for the Datacenter Computer

We have reached a point where distributed computing is ubiquitous. In-memory application data size is outstripping the capacity of individual machines, necessitating its partitioning over clusters of them; online services have high availability requirements, which can be met only by deploying systems as collections of multiple redundant components; high durability requirements can be satisfied only through data replication, sometimes across vast geographical distances. While it has arguably never been easier to procure the necessary hardware and to deploy distributed applications with a variety of tools from cluster orchestrators such as Kubernetes to newer paradigms such as functions-as-a-service, building correct and efficient distributed solutions largely remains an individual exercise.