About me

I am a 5th-year PhD student at University of Maryland, College Park, fortunate to be advised by Prof. Alan (Zaoxing) Liu. My research interests are broadly in systems and networking. In particular, I attempt to bridge the gap between approximate algorithms (e.g., sampling, sketches) and practical computing systems, aiming to improve query performance and system scalability. Currently, I’m working on scalable cloud telemetry systems.

I received my B.E. for Computer Science from Xi’an Jiaotong University in 2021.

News

[09/2025] PromSketch will be presented at VLDB’25!
[05/2025] I will be interning at Microsoft Strategic Planning and Architecture (SPARC) group this summer :)
[04/2025] PromSketch was accepted by VLDB’25!
[03/2025] A paper on Economic Denial of Service was accepted by SIGMETRICS’25!
[10/2024] NetMigrate was presented at P4 Workshop!
[12/2023] NetMigrate was accepted by FAST’24!

Publications

[VLDB’25] Approximation-First Timeseries Query At Scale
Zeying Zhu, Jonathan Chamberlain, Kenny Wu, David Starobinski, Zaoxing Liu
[Paper] [Code] [Demo]

Paper summary

Timeseries monitoring systems such as Prometheus play a crucial role in gaining observability of the underlying system infrastructure. These systems collect timeseries metrics from various system components and perform monitoring queries over periodic windowbased aggregations (i.e., rule queries). However, despite wide adoption, the operational costs and query latency of rule queries remain high. In this paper, we identify major bottlenecks associated with repeated data scans and query computations concerning window overlaps in rule queries, and present PromSketch, an approximation-first query framework as intermediate caches for monitoring systems. It enables low operational costs and query latency, by combining approximate window-based query frameworks and sketch-based precomputation. PromSketch is implemented as a standalone module that can be integrated into Prometheus and VictoriaMetrics, covering 70% of Prometheus’ aggregation over time queries. Our evaluation shows that PromSketch achieves up to a two-orderof-magnitude reduction in query latency over Prometheus and VictoriaMetrics, while lowering operational dollar costs of query processing by three orders of magnitude compared to Prometheus and by at least 4x compared to VictoriaMetrics with at most 5% average errors across statistics.

[SIGMETRICS’25] Exploiting Kubernetes Autoscaling for Economic Denial of Sustainability
Jonathan Chamberlain, Jilin Zheng, Zeying Zhu, Zaoxing Liu, David Starobinski
[Paper]

Paper summary

The flexibility and scale of networks achievable by modern cloud computer architectures, particularly Kubernetes (K8s)-based applications, are rivaled only by the resulting complexity required to operate at scale in a responsive manner. This leaves applications vulnerable to Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) attacks, designed to force service withdrawal via draining the target of the financial means to support the application. With the public cloud market projected to reach three quarters of a trillion dollars USD by the end of 2025, this is a major consideration. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model to reason about EDoS attacks on K8s. We determine scaling thresholds based on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), incorporating costs of operating K8s replicas, Service Level Agreement violations, and minimum service charges imposed by billing structures. We build on top of the MDP model a Stackelberg game, determining the circumstances under which an adversary injects traffic. The optimal policy returned by the MDP is generally of hysteresis-type, but not always. Specifically, through numerical evaluations we show examples where charges on an hourly resolution eliminate incentives for scaling down resources. Furthermore, through the use of experiments on a realistic K8s cluster, we show that, depending on the billing model employed and the customer workload characteristics, an EDoS attack can result in a 4× increase in traffic intensity resulting in a 3.6× decrease in efficiency. Interestingly, increasing the intensity of an attack may render it less efficient per unit of attack power. Finally, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept for a countermeasure involving custom scaling metrics where autoscaling decisions are randomized. We demonstrate that per-minute utilization charges are reduced compared to standard scaling, with negligible drops in requests.

[FAST’24, P4 Workshop 2024] In-Memory Key-Value Store Live Migration with NetMigrate
Zeying Zhu, Yibo Zhao, Zaoxing Liu
[Artifacts Available] [Artifacts Functional] [Artifacts Reusable]
[Paper] [Code] [Slides] [FAST’24 Talk] [P4 Workshop Talk]

Paper summary

Distributed key-value stores today require frequent key-value shard migration between nodes to react to dynamic workload changes for load balancing, data locality, and service elasticity. In this paper, we propose NetMigrate, a live migration approach for in-memory key-value stores based on programmable network data planes. NetMigrate migrates shards between nodes with zero service interruption and minimal performance impact. During migration, the switch data plane monitors the migration process in a fine-grained manner and directs client queries to the right server in real time, eliminating the overhead of pulling data between nodes. We implement a NetMigrate prototype on a testbed consisting of a programmable switch and several commodity servers running Redis, and evaluate it under YCSB workloads. Our experiments demonstrate that NetMigrate improves the query throughput from 6.5% to 416% and maintains low access latency during migration, compared to the state-of-the-art migration approaches.

[NSDI’23] Arya: Arbitrary Graph Pattern Mining with Decomposition-based Sampling
Zeying Zhu* , Kan Wu* , Zaoxing Liu
[Paper] [Code] [Slides] [Talk]

Paper summary

Graph pattern mining is compute-intensive in processing massive amounts of graph-structured data. This paper presents Arya, an ultra-fast approximate graph pattern miner that can detect and count arbitrary patterns of a graph. Unlike all prior approximation systems, Arya combines novel graph decomposition theory with edge sampling-based approximation to reduce the complexity of mining complex patterns on graphs with up to tens of billions of edges, a scale that was only possible on supercomputers. Arya can run on a single machine or distributed machines with an Error-Latency Profile (ELP) for users to configure the running time of pattern mining tasks based on different error targets. Our evaluation demonstrates that Arya outperforms existing exact and approximate pattern mining solutions by up to five orders of magnitude. Arya supports graphs with 5 billion edges on a single machine and scales to 10-billion-edge graphs on a 32-server testbed.

*Equal Contribution

Experience

Research Intern
Azure for Operators, Microsoft, WA
May 2022 - Aug. 2022
Fortunate to be mentored by Stefan Saroiu and Alec Wolman

Research Intern
Network Research Group, Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing
Sep. 2020 - May 2021
Fortunate to be mentored by Zhixiong Niu

Teaching

Teaching Assistant, EC527 High Performance Programming with Multicore and GPUs
Boston University, Spring 2023

Teaching Assistant, EC528 Cloud Computing
Boston University, Fall 2022

Services

Journal reviewer: ACM Transactions on Database Systems, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Computer Networks
Conference reviewer: INFOCOM’2023

Awards

Hariri Institute’s Graduate Student Fellowship, Boston University
2023
Distinguished Computer Engineering Fellowship, Boston University
2021
Stars of Tomorrow Internship Award, Microsoft Research Asia
2021
National Scholarship, Ministry of Education, China
2018, 2019, 2020