I am a PhD student in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where I work with Prof. Boris Grot in the EASE Lab. My research focuses on cloud computing and computer systems, with particular emphasis on hybrid systems that integrate serverless and traditional cloud infrastructure.
Previously, I worked at the High Performance Embedded Systems Lab (HESL) at Nanyang Technological University, where I worked with Dr. Deshya Wijesundera and Prof. Thambipillai Srikanthan to develop a memory profiling tool for hardware-software co-design.
I enjoy building practical systems and production software across research and industry, and I am always open to collaborations and conversations. Feel free to shoot me an email at dilina.dehigama (at) ed.ac.uk
Education
PhD in Informatics: 2022–Present
- University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
- Research Focus: Cloud computing and hybrid systems combining serverless and VM-based infrastructure
- Advisor: Prof. Boris Grot
BSc (Hons) in Computer Science [First Class, GPA: 3.93/4.00]: 2017–2021
- University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC), Colombo, Sri Lanka
- Best Final Year Research Project in Computer Science
- Supervisors: Dr. Chamath Keppitiyagama and Dr. Deshya Wijesundera
Professional Graduate Diploma (L6): 2016–2017
- MBCS | Member of British Computer Society
Selected Publications
(New) Spandana: Reconciling Strict SLOs with Low Cost under Fine-Grained Load Fluctuations
D. Dehigama, S. Jesalpura, Z. Xu, M. Nemeth, M. Kogias, and B. Grot.
Accepted at ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC), 2026
Harmonizing Diverse Compute Resources for Efficiency
D. Dehigama, S. Jesalpura, M. Kogias, and B. Grot.
HotInfra Workshop at SOSP, 2024 (Austin, Texas)
Composing Microservices and Serverless for Load Resilience
D. Dehigama, S. Jesalpura, A. Katsarakis, M. Kogias, R. Kumar, and B. Grot.
SESAME at EuroSys '24 (Athens, Greece)
Selected Awards
University of Edinburgh Informatics PhD Scholarship (2022)
- Full scholarship covering PhD tuition fees and annual stipend support (total value of ~ £190,000).
ICTA Gold Medal - Best Final Year Computer Science Research Project (2021)
- Awarded for the best undergraduate final year research project and thesis at UCSC.
- Thesis : Hardware software partitioning for FPGA based MPSoC.
Presidential Award & Felicitation (2016)
- Awarded for obtaining National Rank 2 at G.C.E. (A/L) Examination - 2015.
Teaching, Mentorship & Service
Teaching Assistant / Tutor / Marker
- Introduction to Computer Systems (Inf2C), University of Edinburgh - Oct 2023 to Oct 2025
Research Intern Supervision
- School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh - Jan 2022 to Present
- Zeyu Xu: Evaluated hybrid systems that use burstable and on-demand VMs to manage load fluctuations.
- Mária Ďuračková: Optimized the STeLLAR serverless tail-latency analyzer platform.
- Arnav Bhargava and Taymaz Khormali: Ported microservice benchmark suites to FaaS platforms.
Leadership & Volunteering
- Artifact Evaluator: ISCA '25 and HPCA '24
- Google Summer of Code Mentor (2020)
- Google Code-in Mentor (2017, 2018, 2019)
- Vice President, People Management: AIESEC in Sri Lanka (Colombo)
- Vice President: IEEE Student Branch of UCSC
Lecturer
- BCS Level 05 Diploma in IT (Web Application Development), LiveCollege Sri Lanka - Oct 2021 to Apr 2022
Technical Skills
Cloud & Systems
AWS
Lambda
EC2
EKS
Kubernetes
Docker
Linux
Programming & Backend
Go
Python
Node.js
TypeScript
JavaScript
GraphQL
REST
gRPC
Frontend & Mobile
React
React Native
Angular
Flutter
Data, Observability & Tooling
PostgreSQL
MongoDB
MySQL
Prometheus
Grafana
Git
GitHub Actions
@inproceedings{dehigama2026spandana,
title = {Spandana: Reconciling Strict SLOs with Low Cost under Fine-Grained Load Fluctuations},
author = {Dehigama, Dilina and Jesalpura, Smit and Xu, Zhihao and Nemeth, Marcell and Kogias, Marios and Grot, Boris},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC)},
year = {2026},
note = {Accepted}
}
@inproceedings{d494de1d227b46ed8429240dd9f9625b,
title = "Harmonizing diverse compute resources for efficiency",
abstract = "Online services are characterized by significant load fluctuations at fine-grained intervals even when coarse-grained load measurements indicate a relatively stable load. Running such services on virtual machines (VMs) rented from a cloud provider like AWS, which is a typical way to deploy online applications today, is inefficient due to the need to overprovision VM capacity to meet the SLO under variable load. In contrast, serverless computing is highly elastic but is prohibitively expensive for serving a large volume of requests. We thus argue for combining the different types of compute (i.e., VM and serverless instances) to achieve both cost-efficiency and elasticity. Our results show that hybrid compute is more cost effective than even an optimal VMonly allocation that provisions just enough resource to meet the SLO using perfect knowledge of future load.",
author = "Dilina Dehigama and Shyam Jesalpura and Marios Kogias and Boris Grot",
year = "2024",
month = nov,
day = "3",
language = "English",
pages = "1--4",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Hot Topics in System Infrastructure",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)",
address = "United States",
note = "The 2nd Workshop on Hot Topics in System Infrastructure, HotInfra'24 ; Conference date: 03-11-2024 Through 03-11-2024",
url = "https://hotinfra24.github.io/",
}
@conference{9987358b722b4062a1ace674d6699335,
title = "Composing microservices and serverless for load resilience",
abstract = "Online services strive to maintain application responsiveness even when the traffic is unpredictable and fluctuating. Today{\textquoteright}s online services are commonly deployed as graphs of microservices, each microservice packaged as one or more containers inside a virtual machines (VMs). While performant and affordable when the load is steady, VM-based deployments are known to be slow to scale when the load spikes, resulting in degraded performance for end-users of the service. To avoid such performance degradations, service providers can over-provision their deployments; however, such a strategy is costly and inefficient, leaving resources heavily under-utilized for extended periods of time. To address this challenge, we propose Hydra, a hybrid architecture that combines microservices with serverless computing. Hydra utilizes VMs to handle steady workloads cost-effectively and leverages serverless elasticity to absorb traffic spikes. When compared to an all-VM deployment with Kubernetes auto-scaling, Hydra achieves a 62.4\% reduction in peak tail latency with a minimal 2.3\% increase in cost.",
author = "Dilina Dehigama and Shyam Jesalpura and Antonios Katsarakis and Marios Kogias and Rakesh Kumar and Boris Grot",
year = "2024",
month = apr,
day = "22",
language = "English",
pages = "1--8",
note = "The 2nd Workshop on SErverless Systems, Applications and MEthodologies, SESAME 2024 ; Conference date: 22-04-2024 Through 22-04-2024",
url = "https://sesame2024.github.io/",
}