RPCValet: NI-driven tail-aware balancing of µs-scale RPCs

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RPCValet: NI-driven tail-aware balancing of µs-scale RPCs Daglis et al., ASPLOS'19 Last week we learned about the [increased tail-latency sensitivity of microservices based applications with high RPC fan-outs. Seer uses estimates of queue depths to mitigate latency spikes on the order of 10-100ms, in conjunction with a cluster manager. Today’s paper choice, RPCValet, operates at ... Continue Reading

Seer: leveraging big data to navigate the complexity of performance debugging in cloud microservices

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Seer: leveraging big data to navigate the complexity of performance debugging in cloud microservices Gan et al., ASPLOS'19 Last time around we looked at the DeathStarBench suite of microservices-based benchmark applications and learned that microservices systems can be especially latency sensitive, and that hotspots can propagate through a microservices architecture in interesting ways. Seer is ... Continue Reading

An open-source benchmark suite for microservices and their hardware-software implications for cloud & edge systems

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments
An open-source benchmark suite for microservices and their hardware-software implications for cloud & edge systems Gan et al., ASPLOS'19 Microservices are well known for producing ‘death star’ interaction diagrams like those shown below, where each point on the circumference represents an individual service, and the lines between them represent interactions. Systems built with lots of ... Continue Reading

Keeping master green at scale

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
Keeping master green at scale Ananthanarayanan et al., EuroSys'19 This paper provides a fascinating look at a key part of Uber’s software delivery machine. With a monorepo, and many thousands of engineers concurrently committing changes, keeping the build green, and keeping commit-to-live latencies low, is a major challenge. This paper introduces a change management system ... Continue Reading

Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments
Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking Michael et al., EuroSys'19 On the surface you might think today’s paper selection an odd pick. It describes the labs environment, DSLabs, developed at the University of Washington to accompany a course in distributed systems. During the ten week course, students implement four different assignments: an exactly-once ... Continue Reading