Unikernels: Library Operating Systems for the Cloud - Madhavapeddy et al. 2013 See also: Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System from ACM Queue. As we discussed in a previous edition of The Morning Paper, there is an increasing mismatch between the traditional OS design point, and the way that we are using the … Continue reading Unikernels: Library Operating Systems for the Cloud
How to write a 21st Century Proof
How to write a 21st Century Proof - Lamport 2012 In this paper Leslie Lamport shares what he has learned in well over 20 years of writing proofs. I am a computer scientist who was educated as a mathematician. I discovered structured proofs through my work on concurrent (multiprocess) algorithms. These algorithms can be quite … Continue reading How to write a 21st Century Proof
A Brief History of the Internet
A Brief History of the Internet - Leiner et al. 2003. The above link is to an HTML version. There's a pdf available on the ACM Digital Library too if you have access. This paper was written to give "a factual rendering of the events and activities associated with the development of the early Internet," … Continue reading A Brief History of the Internet
Spanner: Google’s Globally Distributed Database
Spanner: Google's Globally Distributed Database - Google 2012 Since we've spent the last two days looking at F1 and its online asynchronous schema change support, it seems appropriate today to look at Spanner, the system that underpins them both. There are three interesting stories that come out of the paper for me, each of which … Continue reading Spanner: Google’s Globally Distributed Database
Reflections on 100 editions of #themorningpaper
I almost missed the milestone, and then I realised that today was the 100th paper in the #themorningpaper series! I'm sure most readers of my blog posts have figured out the formula by now: I review one CS paper every weekday morning and post the write-up on this blog. Each morning paper is announced via … Continue reading Reflections on 100 editions of #themorningpaper
Online, Aysnchronous Schema Change in F1
Online, Asynchronous Schema Change in F1 Rae et al. 2013 Continuous deployment and evolution of running services with zero downtime is the holy grail. With stateless services this is comparatively easy to achieve. But once we have stateless services, and especially large volumes of data in a store, things get more difficult. We would ideally … Continue reading Online, Aysnchronous Schema Change in F1
F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales
F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales - Google 2012 (** updated paper link above, thanks to Brenden Kromhout for pointing out the dead link **) In recent years, conventional wisdom in the engineering community has been that if you need a highly scalable, high- throughput data store, the only viable option is to use … Continue reading F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales
Blazes: Coordination analysis for distributed programs
Blazes: Coordination analysis for distributed programs - Alvaro et al. 2014 For many practitioners distributed consistency is the most critical issue for system performance and manageability at scale. In Blazes, Alvaro et al. take a fresh look at 'an urgent issue for distributed systems developers,' namely the correctness and efficiency of distributed consistency mechanisms for … Continue reading Blazes: Coordination analysis for distributed programs
Derflow: Distributed Deterministic Dataflow programming for Erlang
Derflow: Distributed Deterministic Dataflow programming for Erlang - Bravo et al. 2014 Today's choice is part of the work of the SyncFree European research project on large-scale computation without synchronisation. Non-determinism makes it very difficult to reason about distributed applications. So Bravo et al. figured life might be easier if we could just make them … Continue reading Derflow: Distributed Deterministic Dataflow programming for Erlang
The Network is Reliable
The Network is Reliable - Bailis and Kingsbury 2014 This must be the easiest paper summary to write of the series so far. The network is reliable? Oh no it isn't... OK, here's a little more detail :) Network reliability matters because it prevents us from having reliable communication, and that in turn makes building … Continue reading The Network is Reliable
the morning paper 