Thomas Gazagnaire
Building Functional Systems from Cloud to Orbit. thomas@gazagnaire.org
I run two companies, both built on OCaml. Tarides maintains the OCaml platform -- opam, Dune, Merlin, odoc, Eio -- and provides long-term support, training, and consulting for teams building secure infrastructure. Parsimoni applies the same ideas to space: deploying payload software to a satellite still looks like deploying to a server in 2005 -- hand-tuned images, bespoke toolchains, months of integration testing. SpaceOS brings the Docker workflow to satellite payloads, with unikernel images roughly 20x smaller than containers, post-quantum cryptography, and a full CCSDS protocol stack.
A common thread runs through all of this work: better tools produce software that lasts for decades, not just until the next rewrite. Strong types, memory safety, and minimal footprints are not academic luxuries -- they are engineering choices that compound over time.
I co-created MirageOS at the University of Cambridge in 2013 -- a library operating system that compiles OCaml applications into minimal, single-purpose unikernels, stripping away everything the application does not use. We co-founded Unikernel Systems to bring it to production; Docker acquired the company in 2016. The MirageOS network stack now runs inside Docker Desktop on millions of developer machines, and powers Nitrokey's NetHSM -- a commercial hardware security module built entirely on unikernels. It is largely the same code that ran on Xen in 2013.
I also created Opam, the package manager for OCaml, and lead the development of Irmin -- a Git-like distributed store that provides mergeable, branch-consistent data structures for building offline-first and eventually-consistent systems.
Before founding Tarides and Parsimoni, I held engineering and leadership roles at Docker, Citrix, OnApp, and OCamlPro. My research background spans the University of Cambridge, Inria, ENS Lyon, and ENS Rennes.