An empirical guide to the behavior and use of scalable persistent memory, Yang et al., FAST'20 We've looked at multiple papers exploring non-volatile main memory and its implications (e.g. most recently 'Efficient lock-free durable sets'). One thing they all had in common is an evaluation using some kind of simulation of the expected behaviour of … Continue reading An empirical guide to the behavior and use of scalable persistent memory
Author: adriancolyer
Venture Partner with Accel in London, author of 'The Morning Paper'
Understanding, detecting and localizing partial failures in large system software
Understanding, detecting and localizing partial failures in large system software, Lou et al., NSDI'20 Partial failures (gray failures) occur when some but not all of the functionalities of a system are broken. On the surface everything can appear to be fine, but under the covers things may be going astray. When a partial failure occurs, … Continue reading Understanding, detecting and localizing partial failures in large system software
When correlation (or lack of it) can be causation
Rex: preventing bugs and misconfiguration in large services using correlated change analysis, Mehta et al., NSDI'20 and Check before you change: preventing correlated failures in service updates, Zhai et al., NSDI'20 Today's post is a double header. I've chosen two papers from NSDI'20 that are both about correlation. Rex is a tool widely deployed across … Continue reading When correlation (or lack of it) can be causation
Characterizing, modeling, and benchmarking RocksDB key-value workloads at Facebook
Characterizing, modeling, and benchmarking RocksDB key-value workloads at Facebook, Cao et al., FAST'20 You get good at what you practice. Or in the case of key-value stores, what you benchmark. So if you want to design a system that will offer good real-world performance, it's really useful to have benchmarks that accurately represent real-world workloads. … Continue reading Characterizing, modeling, and benchmarking RocksDB key-value workloads at Facebook
Building an elastic query engine on disaggregated storage
Building an elastic query engine on disaggregated storage, Vuppalapati, NSDI'20 This paper describes the design decisions behind the Snowflake cloud-based data warehouse. As the saying goes, 'all snowflakes are special' - but what is it exactly that's special about this one? When I think about cloud-native architectures, I think about disaggregation (enabling each resource type … Continue reading Building an elastic query engine on disaggregated storage
Millions of tiny databases
Millions of tiny databases, Brooker et al., NSDI'20 This paper is a real joy to read. It takes you through the thinking processes and engineering practices behind the design of a key part of the control plane for AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS): the Physalia database that stores configuration information. In the same spirit as … Continue reading Millions of tiny databases
Firecracker: lightweight virtualization for serverless applications
Firecracker: lightweight virtualisation for serverless applications, Agache et al., NSDI'20 Finally the NSDI'20 papers have opened up to the public (as of last week), and what a great looking crop of papers it is. We looked at a couple of papers that had pre-prints available last week, today we'll be looking at one of the … Continue reading Firecracker: lightweight virtualization for serverless applications
Gandalf: an intelligent, end-to-end analytics service for safe deployment in cloud-scale infrastructure
Gandalf: an intelligent, end-to-end analytics service for safe deployment in cloud-scale infrastructure, Li et al., NSDI'20 Modern software systems at scale are incredibly complex ever changing environments. Despite all the pre-deployment testing you might employ, this makes it really tough to change them with confidence. Thus it's common to use some form of phased rollout, … Continue reading Gandalf: an intelligent, end-to-end analytics service for safe deployment in cloud-scale infrastructure
Meaningful availability
Meaningful availability, Hauer et al., NSDI'20 With thanks to Damien Mathieu for the recommendation. This very clearly written paper describes the Google G Suite team's search for a meaningful availability metric: one that accurately reflected what their end users experienced, and that could be used by engineers to pinpoint issues and guide improvements. > A … Continue reading Meaningful availability
AnyLog: a grand unification of the Internet of things
AnyLog: a grand unification of the Internet of Things, Abadi et al., CIDR'20 The Web provides decentralised publishing and direct access to unstructured data (searching / querying that data has turned out to be a pretty centralised affair in practice though). AnyLog wants to do for structured (relational) data what the Web has done for … Continue reading AnyLog: a grand unification of the Internet of things
the morning paper 