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Characterizing, modeling, and benchmarking RocksDB key-value workloads at Facebook

~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment
Characterizing, modeling, and benchmarking RocksDB key-value workloads at Facebook, Cao et al., FAST'20 You get good at what you practice. Or in the case of key-value stores, what you benchmark. So if you want to design a system that will offer good real-world performance, it's really useful to have benchmarks that accurately represent real-world workloads. ... Continue Reading

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

~ 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

Applied machine learning at Facebook: a datacenter infrastructure perspective

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments
Applied machine learning at Facebook: a datacenter infrastructure perspective Hazelwood et al., _HPCA’18 _ This is a wonderful glimpse into what it’s like when machine learning comes to pervade nearly every part of a business, with implications top-to-bottom through the whole stack. It’s amazing to step back and think just how fundamentally software systems have ... Continue Reading

Maelstrom: mitigating datacenter-level disasters by draining interdependent traffic safely and efficiently

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments
Maelstrom: mitigating datacenter-level disasters by draining interdependent traffic safely and efficiently Veeraraghavan et al., OSDI'18 Here’s a really valuable paper detailing four plus years of experience dealing with datacenter outages at Facebook. Maelstrom is the system Facebook use in production to mitigate and recover from datacenter-level disasters. The high level idea is simple: drain traffic ... Continue Reading

Unveiling and quantifying Facebook exploitation of sensitive personal data for advertising purposes

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments
Unveiling and quantifying Facebook exploitation of sensitive personal data for advertising purposes Cabañas et al., USENIX Security 2018 Earlier this week we saw how the determined can still bypass most browser and tracker-blocking extension protections to track users around the web. Today’s paper is a great example of why you should care about that. Cabañas ... Continue Reading

Privacy risks with Facebook’s PII-based targeting: auditing a data broker’s advertising interface

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments
Privacy risks with Facebook’s PII-based targeting: auditing a data broker’s advertising interface Venkatadri et al., IEEE Security and Privacy 2018 This is one of those jaw-hits-the-floor, can’t quite believe what I’m reading papers. The authors describe an attack exploiting Facebook’s custom audience feature, that can leak your PII. Specifically, we show how the adversary can ... Continue Reading