Mergeable replicated data types – Part I

November 25, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 16 Comments

Mergeable replicated data types Kaki et al., OOPSLA'19 This paper was published at OOPSLA, but perhaps it’s amongst the distributed systems community that I expect there to be the greatest interest. Mergeable Replicated Data Types (MRDTs) are in the same spirit as CRDTs but with the very interesting property that they compose. Furthermore, a principled ... Continue Reading

PlanAlyzer: assessing threats to the validity of online experiments

November 22, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

PlanAlyzer: assessing threats to the validity of online experiments Tosch et al., OOPSLA'19 It’s easy to make experimental design mistakes that invalidate your online controlled experiments. At an organisation like Facebook (who kindly supplied the corpus of experiments used in this study), the state of art is to have a pool of experts carefully review ... Continue Reading

Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

November 20, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 32 Comments

Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud Kleppmann et al., Onward! '19 Watch out! If you start reading this paper you could be lost for hours following all the interesting links and ideas, and end up even more dissatisfied than you already are with the state of software today. You might ... Continue Reading

Formal foundations of serverless computing

November 18, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Formal foundations of serverless computing Jangda et al., OOPSLA'19 Jangda et al. won a distinguished paper award at OOPSLA this year for their work on ‘Formal foundations of serverless computing.’ Central to the paper is their observation that the serverless execution environment has a number of unique properties (such as warm starting / reuse of ... Continue Reading

Taiji: managing global user traffic for large-scale Internet services at the edge

November 15, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Taiji: managing global user traffic for large-scale internet services at the edge Xu et al., SOSP'19 It’s another networking paper to close out the week (and our coverage of SOSP’19), but whereas Snap looked at traffic routing within the datacenter, Taiji is concerned with routing traffic from the edge to a datacenter. It’s been in ... Continue Reading

Scaling symbolic evaluation for automated verification of systems code with Serval

November 13, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Scaling symbolic evaluation for automated verification of systems code with Serval Nelson et al., SOSP'19 Serval is a framework for developing automated verifiers of systems software. It makes an interesting juxtaposition to the approach Google took with Snap that we looked at last time out. I’m sure that Google engineers do indeed take extreme care ... Continue Reading

Snap: a microkernel approach to host networking

November 11, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

Snap: a microkernel approach to host networking Marty et al., SOSP'19 This paper describes the networking stack, Snap, that has been running in production at Google for the last three years+. It’s been clear for a while that software designed explicitly for the data center environment will increasingly want/need to make different design trade-offs to ... Continue Reading

The inflection point hypothesis: a principled approach to finding the root cause of a failure

November 8, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

The inflection point hypothesis: a principled debugging approach for locating the root cause of a failure Zhang et al., SOSP'19 It’s been a while since we looked a debugging and troubleshooting on The Morning Paper (here’s a sample of earlier posts on the topic). Today’s paper introduces a root cause of failure detector for those ... Continue Reading

File systems unfit as distributed storage backends: lessons from ten years of Ceph evolution

November 6, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

File systems unfit as distributed storage backends: lessons from 10 years of Ceph evolution Aghayev et al., SOSP'19 Ten years of hard-won lessons packed into just 17 pages (13 if you don’t count the references!) makes this paper extremely good value for your time. It’s also a fabulous example of recognising and challenging implicit assumptions. ... Continue Reading

An analysis of performance evolution of Linux’s core operations

November 4, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

An analysis of performance evolution of Linux’s core operations Ren et al., SOSP'19 I was drawn in by the headline results here: This paper presents an analysis of how Linux’s performance has evolved over the past seven years... To our surprise, the study shows that the performance of many core operations has worsened or fluctuated ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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