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

~ 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

~ 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

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