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Cloudy with a high chance of DBMS: a 10-year prediction for enterprise-grade ML

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments
Cloudy with a high chance of DBMS: a 10-year prediction for enterprise-grade ML, Agrawal et al., CIDR'20 "Cloudy with a high chance of DBMS" is a fascinating vision paper from a group of experts at Microsoft, looking at the transition of machine learning from being primarily the domain of large-scale, high-volume consumer applications to being ... Continue Reading

Let’s Encrypt: an automated certificate authority to encrypt the entire web

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 19 Comments
Let's encrypt: an automated certificate authority to encrypt the entire web, Aas et al., CCS'19 This paper tells the story of Let's Encrypt, from it's early beginnings in 2012/13 all the way to becoming the world's largest HTTPS Certificate Authority (CA) today - accounting for more currently valid certificates than all other browser-trusted CAs combined. ... Continue Reading

Watching you watch: the tracking system of over-the-top TV streaming devices

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 14 Comments
Watching you watch: the tracking ecosystem of over-the-top TV streaming devices, Moghaddam et al., CCS'19 The results from this paper are all too predictable: channels on Over-The-Top (OTT) streaming devices are insecure and riddled with privacy leaks. The authors quantify the scale of the problem, and note that users have even less viable defence mechanisms ... Continue Reading

Cloudburst: stateful functions-as-a-service

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
Cloudburst: stateful functions-as-a-service, Sreekanti et al., arXiv 2020 Today's paper choice is a fresh-from-the-arXivs take on serverless computing from the RISELab at Berkeley, addressing some of the limitations outlined in last year's 'Berkeley view on serverless computing.' Stateless is fine until you need state, at which point the coarse-grained solutions offered by current platforms limit ... Continue Reading

Seamless offloading of web app computations from mobile device to edge clouds via HTML5 Web Worker migration

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 15 Comments
Seamless offloading of web app computations from mobile device to edge clouds via HTML5 web worker migration, Jeong et al., SoCC'19 [^1] This paper caught my eye for its combination of an intriguing idea (opportunistic offload of computation from mobile devices to the edge) and the elegance of the way the web worker interface supports ... Continue Reading

Narrowing the gap between serverless and its state with storage functions

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 12 Comments
Narrowing the gap between serverless and its state with storage functions, Zhang et al., SoCC'19 "Narrowing the gap" was runner-up in the SoCC'19 best paper awards. While being motivated by serverless use cases, there's nothing especially serverless about the key-value store, Shredder, this paper reports on. Shredder's novelty lies in a new implementation of an ... Continue Reading