Efthymios Papageorgiou

202 Accepted! I’m Efthymis Papageorgiou, though most people call me Makis. I’m originally from Athens, Greece, and I’ve been at the Computer Science Department (CSD) of the University of Crete since 2019.

I’m currently a second-year Ph.D. student there, working under the supervision of Prof. Kostas Magoutis, and a research assistant in the Information Systems Lab at the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH).

If I had to place myself in the tech stack, I’d sit at the operating-system layer, just for a whole cluster rather than a single machine. I work on resource management and autoscaling for SLO-targeted microservice-based systems.

Right now, I’m focusing on fine-grained CPU allocation, down to the millicore, for SLO-targeted microservices. I lean toward control-theoretic approaches because they are explainable and their behavior is something you can actually reason about.

A related interest is overload control. Autoscalers need time to react, so when demand spikes faster than resources can be added, the system somehow has to protect itself.

I tend to see autoscaling and overload control as two halves of one supply-and-demand problem: autoscaling adjusts supply, while overload control shapes demand. I believe they work best when designed together, not in isolation.

As a Ph.D. student, stepping away from research always comes with a bit of guilt, since there’s always another experiment I should be running. Still, when I manage it, I watch European basketball, read/watch sci-fi, play some bass guitar, or do nothing at all, which is the hardest one to do guilt-free.

Feel free to reach out.