Mergeable replicated data types Kaki et al., OOPSLA'19 This paper was published at OOPSLA, but perhaps it’s amongst the distributed systems community that I expect there to be the greatest interest. Mergeable Replicated Data Types (MRDTs) are in the same spirit as CRDTs but with the very interesting property that they compose. Furthermore, a principled … Continue reading Mergeable replicated data types – Part I
Author: adriancolyer
Venture Partner with Accel in London, author of 'The Morning Paper'
PlanAlyzer: assessing threats to the validity of online experiments
PlanAlyzer: assessing threats to the validity of online experiments Tosch et al., OOPSLA'19 It’s easy to make experimental design mistakes that invalidate your online controlled experiments. At an organisation like Facebook (who kindly supplied the corpus of experiments used in this study), the state of art is to have a pool of experts carefully review … Continue reading PlanAlyzer: assessing threats to the validity of online experiments
Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud Kleppmann et al., Onward! '19 Watch out! If you start reading this paper you could be lost for hours following all the interesting links and ideas, and end up even more dissatisfied than you already are with the state of software today. You might … Continue reading Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
Formal foundations of serverless computing
Formal foundations of serverless computing Jangda et al., OOPSLA'19 Jangda et al. won a distinguished paper award at OOPSLA this year for their work on ‘Formal foundations of serverless computing.’ Central to the paper is their observation that the serverless execution environment has a number of unique properties (such as warm starting / reuse of … Continue reading Formal foundations of serverless computing
Taiji: managing global user traffic for large-scale Internet services at the edge
Taiji: managing global user traffic for large-scale internet services at the edge Xu et al., SOSP'19 It’s another networking paper to close out the week (and our coverage of SOSP’19), but whereas Snap looked at traffic routing within the datacenter, Taiji is concerned with routing traffic from the edge to a datacenter. It’s been in … Continue reading Taiji: managing global user traffic for large-scale Internet services at the edge
Scaling symbolic evaluation for automated verification of systems code with Serval
Scaling symbolic evaluation for automated verification of systems code with Serval Nelson et al., SOSP'19 Serval is a framework for developing automated verifiers of systems software. It makes an interesting juxtaposition to the approach Google took with Snap that we looked at last time out. I’m sure that Google engineers do indeed take extreme care … Continue reading Scaling symbolic evaluation for automated verification of systems code with Serval
Snap: a microkernel approach to host networking
Snap: a microkernel approach to host networking Marty et al., SOSP'19 This paper describes the networking stack, Snap, that has been running in production at Google for the last three years+. It’s been clear for a while that software designed explicitly for the data center environment will increasingly want/need to make different design trade-offs to … Continue reading Snap: a microkernel approach to host networking
The inflection point hypothesis: a principled approach to finding the root cause of a failure
The inflection point hypothesis: a principled debugging approach for locating the root cause of a failure Zhang et al., SOSP'19 It’s been a while since we looked a debugging and troubleshooting on The Morning Paper (here’s a sample of earlier posts on the topic). Today’s paper introduces a root cause of failure detector for those … Continue reading The inflection point hypothesis: a principled approach to finding the root cause of a failure
File systems unfit as distributed storage backends: lessons from ten years of Ceph evolution
File systems unfit as distributed storage backends: lessons from 10 years of Ceph evolution Aghayev et al., SOSP'19 Ten years of hard-won lessons packed into just 17 pages (13 if you don’t count the references!) makes this paper extremely good value for your time. It’s also a fabulous example of recognising and challenging implicit assumptions. … Continue reading File systems unfit as distributed storage backends: lessons from ten years of Ceph evolution
An analysis of performance evolution of Linux’s core operations
An analysis of performance evolution of Linux’s core operations Ren et al., SOSP'19 I was drawn in by the headline results here: This paper presents an analysis of how Linux’s performance has evolved over the past seven years... To our surprise, the study shows that the performance of many core operations has worsened or fluctuated … Continue reading An analysis of performance evolution of Linux’s core operations
the morning paper 