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

May 13, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ 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

Distributed consensus revised – Part III

May 10, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

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 II

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

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 I

May 7, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

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

Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking

April 17, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ 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

Calvin: fast distributed transactions for partitioned database systems

March 29, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

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

Amazon Aurora: on avoiding distributed consensus for I/Os, commits, and membership changes

March 27, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

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: design considerations for high throughput cloud-native relational databases

March 25, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

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

Datacenter RPCs can be general and fast

March 18, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 9 Comments

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

Exploiting commutativity for practical fast replication

March 15, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

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

the morning paper

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Distributed Systems