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 An open-source benchmark suite for microservices and their hardware-software implications for cloud & edge systems
Tag: Distributed Systems
Core distributed systems topics, for example consistency, availability and so on.
Distributed consensus revised – Part III
Distributed consensus revised (part III) Howard, PhD thesis With all the ground work laid, the second half of the thesis progressively generalises the Paxos algorithm: weakening the quorum intersection requirements; reusing intersections to allow decisions to be reached with fewer participants; weakening the value selection rules; and sharing phases to take best advantage of the … Continue reading Distributed consensus revised – Part III
Distributed consensus revised – Part II
Distributed consensus revised (part II) Howard, PhD thesis In today’s post we’re going to be looking at chapter 3 of Dr Howard’s thesis, which is a tour ("systematisation of knowledge", SoK) of some of the major known revisions to the classic Paxos algorithm. Negative responses (NACKs) In classic Paxos acceptors only send replies to proposer … Continue reading Distributed consensus revised – Part II
Distributed consensus revised – Part I
Distributed consensus revised Howard, PhD thesis Welcome back to a new term of The Morning Paper! To kick things off, I’m going to start by taking a look at Dr Howard’s PhD thesis, ‘Distributed consensus revised’. This is obviously longer than a standard paper, so we’ll break things down over a few days. As the … Continue reading Distributed consensus revised – Part I
Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking
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 Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking
Calvin: fast distributed transactions for partitioned database systems
Calvin: fast distributed transactions for partitioned database systems Thomson et al., SIGMOD'12 Earlier this week we looked at Amazon’s Aurora. Today it’s the turn of Calvin, which is notably used by FaunaDB (strictly “_FaunaDB uses patent-pending technology inspired by Calvin...”). As the paper title suggests, the goal of Calvin is to put the ACID back … Continue reading Calvin: fast distributed transactions for partitioned database systems
Amazon Aurora: on avoiding distributed consensus for I/Os, commits, and membership changes
Amazon Aurora: on avoiding distributed consensus for I/Os, commits, and membership changes, Verbitski et al., SIGMOD’18 This is a follow-up to the paper we looked at earlier this week on the design of Amazon Aurora. I’m going to assume a level of background knowledge from that work and skip over the parts of this paper … Continue reading Amazon Aurora: on avoiding distributed consensus for I/Os, commits, and membership changes
Amazon Aurora: design considerations for high throughput cloud-native relational databases
Amazon Aurora: design considerations for high throughput cloud-native relational databases Verbitski et al., SIGMOD'17 Werner Vogels recently published a blog post describing Amazon Aurora as their fastest growing service ever. That post provides a high level overview of Aurora and then links to two SIGMOD papers for further details. Also of note is the recent … Continue reading Amazon Aurora: design considerations for high throughput cloud-native relational databases
Datacenter RPCs can be general and fast
Datacenter RPCs can be general and fast Kalia et al., NSDI'19 We’ve seen a lot of exciting work exploiting combinations of RDMA, FPGAs, and programmable network switches in the quest for high performance distributed systems. I’m as guilty as anyone for getting excited about all of that. The wonderful thing about today’s paper, for which … Continue reading Datacenter RPCs can be general and fast
Exploiting commutativity for practical fast replication
Exploiting commutativity for practical fast replication Park & Ousterhout, NSDI'19 I’m really impressed with this work. The authors give us a practical-to-implement enhancement to replication schemes (e.g., as used in primary-backup systems) that offers a signification performance boost. I’m expecting to see this picked up and rolled-out in real-world systems as word spreads. At a … Continue reading Exploiting commutativity for practical fast replication
the morning paper 