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

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

February 19, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ 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

Migrating a privacy-safe information extraction system to a Software 2.0 design

February 17, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

Migrating a privacy-safe information extraction system to a software 2.0 design, Sheng, CIDR'20 This is a comparatively short (7 pages) but very interesting paper detailing the migration of a software system to a 'Software 2.0' design. Software 2.0, in case you missed it, is a term coined by Andrej Karpathy to describe software in which ... Continue Reading

Programs, life cycles, and laws of software evolution

February 14, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

Programs, life cycles, and laws of software evolution, Lehman, Proc. IEEE, 1980 Today's paper came highly recommended by Kevlin Henney and Nat Pryce in a Twitter thread last week, thank you both! The footnotes show that the manuscript for this paper was submitted almost exactly 40 years ago - on the 27th February 1980. The ... Continue Reading

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

February 12, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ 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

February 10, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ 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

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer