Distributed Systems

Core distributed systems topics, for example consistency, availability and so on.

Adaptive logging: optimizing logging and recovery costs in distributed in-memory databases

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
Adaptive Logging: Optimizing logging and recovery costs in distributed In-memory databases Yao et al., SIGMOD 2016 This is a paper about the trade-offs between transaction throughput and database recovery time. Intuitively for example, you can do a little more work on each transaction (lowering throughput) in order to reduce the time it takes to recover ... Continue Reading

Diamond: Automating data management and storage for wide-area, reactive applications

~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment
Diamond: Automating data management and storage for wide-area, reactive applications Zhang et al., OSDI 2016 Diamond tackles the end-to-end problem of building reactive applications, defined here as those that update end-user visible state without requiring any explicit user action: … today’s popular applications are reactive: they provide users with the illusion of continuous synchronization across ... Continue Reading

Just say NO to Paxos overhead: replacing consensus with network ordering

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 19 Comments
Just say NO to Paxos overhead: replacing consensus with network ordering Li et al., OSDI 2016 Everyone knows that consensus systems such as Paxos, Viewstamped Replication, and Raft impose high overhead and have limited throughput and scalability. Li et al. carefully examine the assumptions on which those systems are based, and finds out that within ... Continue Reading