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

Barrier-enabled IO stack for flash storage Won et al., FAST’18 The performance of Flash storage has benefited greatly from concurrency and parallelism - for example, multi-channel controllers, large caches, and deep command queues. At the same time, the time to program an individual Flash cell has stayed fairly static (and even become slightly worse in ... Continue Reading

The design, implementation, and deployment of a system to transparently compress hundreds of petabytes of image files for a file storage service Horn et al., NSDI'17 When I first started reading, I thought this paper was going to be about a new compression format Dropbox had introduced for JPEG images. And it is about that, ... Continue Reading

Application crash consistency and performance with CCFS Pillai et al., FAST 2017 I know I tend to get over-excited about some of the research I cover, but this is truly a fabulous piece of work. We looked "All file systems are not created equal" in a previous edition of The Morning Paper, which showed that ... Continue Reading