Checking statistical properties of protocols using TLA+

In my previous post, I mentioned how excited I was about Jack Vanlightly and Markus Kuppe's talk at TLA+ Conference. They showed a new mod... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 1 year ago

SQLite: Past, Present, and Future

SQLite is the most widely deployed database engine (or likely even software of any type) in existence. It is found in nearly every smartpho... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 1 year ago

Strict-serializability, but at what cost, for what purpose?

Strict-serializability guarantees that transactions appear to occur in an order consistent with the "real-time" ordering of those transactio... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 1 year ago

TAOBench: An End-to-End Benchmark for Facebook's Social Network Workloads VLDB22

TAOBench is an opensource benchmarking framework that captures the social graph workload at Meta (who am I kidding, I'll call it Facebook).... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 1 year ago

Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, Managed NoSQL Database

This paper, which appeared in USENIX ATC'22 last week, describes the evolution of the design and implementation of DynamoDB in response to ... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 1 year ago

Consus: Taming the Paxi

This is a 2016 paper by Robert Escriva and Robbert van Renesse. As far as I can see the paper did not get published in a conference or journ... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 1 year ago

Warp: Lightweight Multi-Key Transactions for Key-Value Stores

This paper introduces a simple yet powerful idea to provide efficient multi-key transactions with ACID semantics on top of a sharded NoSQL ... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 1 year ago

Feral Concurrency Control: An Investigation of Modern Application Integrity

The rise of data-intensive “Web 2.0” Internet services has led to popular new Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) programming frameworks. Rathe... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 1 year ago

Anna: Key-Value Store for Any Scale

This paper (ICDE'18) introduces Anna, a CALM / CRDT implementation of a distributed key-value system both at the data structure level as w... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems

The Calvin paper appeared in Sigmod 2012. I had read this paper before, and seen it covered in a reading group, but I never got to write a ... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

How to Go for 10x

I think the 10X term originated from this book . (Correct me if I am wrong. I didn't check this.) It seems like Larry and Sergey are a fan... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations and on Avoiding Distributed Consensus

Amazon Aurora is a high-throughput cloud-native relational database. I will summarize its design as covered by the Sigmod 17 and Sigmod 18 ... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations and on Avoiding Distributed Consensus

Amazon Aurora is a high-throughput cloud-native relational database. I will summarize its design as covered by the Sigmod 17 and Sigmod 18 ... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store (Sigmod 202

This paper  from Sigmod 2021 presents FoundationDB, a transactional key-value store that supports multi-key strictly serializable transacti... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Efficient state-machine-replication via timestamp stability

Tempo is a leaderless Paxos variant implementing a state machine replication (SMR) protocol. Leaderless means, there is no dedicated/stable ... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Deep Reading

How many hours does it take you to read a ~10 page research paper? — Murat Demirbas (Distributolog) (@muratdemirbas) February 8, 2022 Twe... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Layering Atomic Transactions on Facebook’s Online Tao Data Store (VLDB'21)

This paper won the Best Industry Paper Award at VLDB 2021 . I really like the paper. It provides a good amalgamation of database and distrib... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Decoupled Transactions: Low Tail Latency Transactions Atop Jittery Servers

This is a CIDR22 paper by Pat Helland. It is a long paper at 18 pages, followed by 12 pages of  appendix. Since he wrote such a long paper,... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Learning a Technical Subject

I love learning. I wanted to write about how I learn, so I can analyze if there is a method to this madness. I will first talk about what m... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

What’s New with NewSQL?

This paper is by Andy Pavlo and Matthew Aslett, and it appeared in Sigmod 2016.   NoSQL managed to scale horizontally, but this came at the ... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

A read-only transaction anomaly under snapshot isolation

This paper, from Sigmod 2004, is short and sweet. Under snapshot isolation level, it shows a surprising example of a transaction history wh... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Graviton2 and Graviton3

What do modern cloud workloads look like? And what does that have to do with new chip designs? I found these gems in Peter DeSantis's ReInve... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Rabia: Simplifying State-Machine Replication Through Randomization

This paper appeared in SOSP'21 . I took notes and screen-snapshots during the presentation of this paper, and decided to put together a summ... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Learning about distributed systems: where to start?

This is definitely not a "learn distributed systems in 21 days" post. I recommend a principled, from the foundations-up, studying of distrib... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Matchmaker Paxos: A Reconfigurable Consensus Protocol

Michael Whittaker , Joe Hellerstein's PhD student at UC Berkeley, has recently defended his PhD thesis on Compartmentalized Paxos . The thes... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Attitude Determines Your Success

This may sound like a cliche your dad used to tell, but after many years of going through new areas, ventures, and careers, I find this to b... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Progress Beats Perfect

This is a favorite saying of mine. I use it to motivate myself when I feel disheartened about how much I have to learn and improve. If I do ... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Do tightly synchronized clocks help consensus?

Let's start with the impossibility results, a good place to start distributed systems discussion. The coordinated attack result says that i... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Cores that don't count

This paper is from Google and appeared at HotOS 2021 . There is also a very nice 10 minute video presentation for it. So Google found fail-s... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

FoundationDB Record Layer: A Multi-Tenant Structured Datastore

This is a 2019 arxiv report . Back in 2019, when the report was out, I wrote a review about it, but did not publish it then because I felt I... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Silent Data Corruptions at Scale

This paper from Facebook (Arxiv Feb 2021) is referred in the Google fail-silent Corruption Execution Errors (CEEs) paper as the recent mos... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Why Does the Cloud Stop Computing? Lessons from Hundreds of Service Outages

This paper conducts a cloud outage study of 32 popular Internet services, and analyzes outage duration, root causes, impacts, and fix proced... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 2 years ago

Stateright, a Rust model checker for distributed systems written in Rust

Stateright is a model checker for distributed systems. It is provided as a Rust library, and it allows you to verify systems implemented in ... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

Sundial: Fault-Tolerant Clock Synchronization for Datacenters

This paper appeared recently in OSDI 2020 . This paper is about clock synchronization in the data center. I presented this paper for our dis... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

Your Attitude Determines Your Success

This may sound like a cliche your dad used to tell, but after many years of going through new areas, ventures, and careers, I find this to b... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

Defending Computer Science and Engineering in a life raft debate

What is a life raft debate ? In the Life Raft Debate, we imagine that there has been a nuclear war, and the survivors (the audience) are set... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

Foundational Distributed Systems Papers

I talked about the importance of reading foundational papers last week. To followup, here is my compilation of foundational papers in the d... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

Foundational Distributed Systems Papers

I talked about the importance of reading foundational papers last week. To followup, here is my compilation of foundational papers in the d... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

How I Lost 20 Pounds

At the beginning of January I was around 220 pounds (99.7 kg). After a month of dieting and exercise, I am now at 200 pounds (90.7 kg) How d... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

Virtual Consensus in Facebook Delos (2020)

This paper has been awarded a best paper award at OSDI20 , and is authored by Mahesh Balakrishnan, Jason Flinn, Chen Shen, Mihir Dharamshi, ... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

Facebook: The Story (2020) by Steven Levy

I didn't know much about Facebook's story, so many things in the book was news to me.  Here are my two main take-aways from the book.  There... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

Hybrid Clocks Crate in Rust

I have been learning Rust in my spare time. It has a very steep learning curve, but in return you get to use an elegant, fast, and safe prog... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

High availability in cheap distributed key value storage

This paper is authored by Thomas  Kim, Daniel Lin Kit, Gregory Ganger, Michael  Kaminsky, and David Andersen. It appeared in SOCC 2020. The... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

Consolidating concurrency control and consensus for commits under conflicts

This paper is by Shuai Mu, Lamont Nelson, Wyatt Lloyd, and Jinyang Li and it appeared in OSDI 2016. This paper presents Janus, another two-... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

Mathematics for Human Flourishing (2020)

Math is often seen as a cold reclusive discipline. This books talks about the beautiful and graceful side of math. It talks about the role o... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

Zoom, Zoom, Zoom

The new school year is on its way. My daughter is a kindergartener, my other daughter is a fourth grader, and my son is an eight grader. The... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

Distributed Systems Seminar's reading list for Fall 2020

For the Fall semester distributed systems seminar, we will discuss these papers: Bipartisan Paxos: A Family of Fast, Leaderless, Modular Sta... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago

Modeling Streamlet in TLA+

I had provided an overview of the Streamlet blockchain protocol in my last post , please read that before reading this post on modeling Stre... | Continue reading


@muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | 3 years ago