Month: March 2019

Calvin: fast distributed transactions for partitioned database systems

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments
Calvin: fast distributed transactions for partitioned database systems Thomson et al., SIGMOD'12 Earlier this week we looked at Amazon’s Aurora. Today it’s the turn of Calvin, which is notably used by FaunaDB (strictly “_FaunaDB uses patent-pending technology inspired by Calvin...”). As the paper title suggests, the goal of Calvin is to put the ACID back ... Continue Reading

Amazon Aurora: design considerations for high throughput cloud-native relational databases

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments
Amazon Aurora: design considerations for high throughput cloud-native relational databases Verbitski et al., SIGMOD'17 Werner Vogels recently published a blog post describing Amazon Aurora as their fastest growing service ever. That post provides a high level overview of Aurora and then links to two SIGMOD papers for further details. Also of note is the recent ... Continue Reading

Slim: OS kernel support for a low-overhead container overlay network

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
Slim: OS kernel support for a low-overhead container overlay network Zhuo et al., NSDI'19 Container overlay networks rely on packet transformations, with each packet traversing the networking stack twice on its way from the sending container to the receiving container. There are CPU, throughput, and latency overheads associated with those traversals. In this paper, we ... Continue Reading

Understanding lifecycle management complexity of datacenter topologies

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
Understanding lifecycle management complexity of datacenter topologies Zhang et al., NSDI'19 There has been plenty of interesting research on network topologies for datacenters, with Clos-like tree topologies and Expander based graph topologies both shown to scale using widely deployed hardware. This research tends to focus on performance properties such as throughput and latency, together with ... Continue Reading

Exploiting commutativity for practical fast replication

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments
Exploiting commutativity for practical fast replication Park & Ousterhout, NSDI'19 I’m really impressed with this work. The authors give us a practical-to-implement enhancement to replication schemes (e.g., as used in primary-backup systems) that offers a signification performance boost. I’m expecting to see this picked up and rolled-out in real-world systems as word spreads. At a ... Continue Reading

Efficient synchronisation of state-based CRDTs

~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment
Efficient synchronisation of state-based CRDTs Enes et al., arXiv’18 CRDTs are a great example of consistency as logical monotonicity. They come in two main variations: operation-based CRDTs send operations to remote replicas using a reliable dissemination layer with exactly-once causal delivery. (If operations are idempotent then at-least-once is ok too). state-based CRDTs exchange information about ... Continue Reading