Understanding, detecting and localizing partial failures in large system software

March 16, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

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

When correlation (or lack of it) can be causation

March 13, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

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

Characterizing, modeling, and benchmarking RocksDB key-value workloads at Facebook

March 11, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

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

Building an elastic query engine on disaggregated storage

March 9, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

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

Millions of tiny databases

March 4, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 12 Comments

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

Firecracker: lightweight virtualization for serverless applications

March 2, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

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

Gandalf: an intelligent, end-to-end analytics service for safe deployment in cloud-scale infrastructure

February 28, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

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

Meaningful availability

February 26, 2020June 8, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 13 Comments

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 good ... Continue Reading

AnyLog: a grand unification of the Internet of things

February 24, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

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

Extending relational query processing with ML inference

February 21, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Extending relational query processing with ML inference, Karanasos, CIDR'10 This paper provides a little more detail on the concrete work that Microsoft is doing to embed machine learning inference inside an RDBMS, as part of their vision for Enterprise Grade Machine Learning. The motivation is not that inference will perform better inside the database, but ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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