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Showing posts from November, 2020

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Brad Stone 2013)

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This book tells the story of Amazon's first 20 years from 1994 to 2014. It is a long book, but I found it very engaging. In comparison, I had not that much enjoyed  the GooglePlex book from Steven Levy (an author I adore).  A caveat though... In 2014, MacKenzie Scott (then Bezos), a writer herself,  had given the book a 1-star Amazon review  due to inaccuracies, crossing the line of nonfiction to fiction in terms of character development, and failing to provide a balanced narrative. Well, as usual, here are some of my highlights from the book.  D. E. Shaw Bezos was in his midtwenties at the time, five foot eight inches tall, already balding and with the pasty, rumpled appearance of a committed workaholic. He had spent five years on Wall Street and impressed seemingly everyone he encountered with his keen intellect and boundless determination. Upon graduating from Princeton in 1986, Bezos worked for a pair of Columbia professors at a company called Fitel that was developing a priva
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How innovation works and why it flourishes in freedom (2020, by Matt Ridley)

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This was a very enjoyable read from Matt Ridley. This book takes over from where the Rational Optimist book left , and talks about the how and mechanics of innovation. He has some controversial opinions in some areas (like fracking, vaping, GMOs) where you sense a somewhat single-sided treatment of the subjects, but these do not take away from the overall theme and arguments in the book.  I guess I didn't learn anything I didn't already know about the process of innovation. However, I think the book helped increase my respect for the importance of innovation compared to just invention. I recommend the book. The book is worth a read just for the nice anecdotes about the history of innovation in different fields alone. However, the book could have been shorter and better organized (tidier). Also, the book could have made its case for why innovation flourishes in freedom tighter.  Some of my highlights from the book In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Zaphod B
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High availability in cheap distributed key value storage

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This paper is authored by Thomas  Kim, Daniel Lin Kit, Gregory Ganger, Michael  Kaminsky, and David Andersen. It appeared in SOCC 2020. The paper talks about using NVMM for building a distributed key value store. NVMMs are a new technology. They are slowly rolling into the datacenters, but there are still questions about their performance and how many writes it could handle before a write wear. NVMMs have very low latency comparable to DRAM, yet they are 10 times cheaper. Awesome, right? Unfortunately they don't have the same high bandwidth as DRAM or SSDs. Also, they are still not anywhere as cheap as SSDs, and it may not be affordable to want to build all NVMM key-value stores.  Before reading this paper, it is important to understand that this is all about money, money, money. The cost of NVMM and SSDs influences the design decisions, and lead to this non-straightforward heterogeneous design. If cost was not an issue, we could even have DRAMs for all replicas in K-V store, eas
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Consolidating concurrency control and consensus for commits under conflicts

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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-in-one shampoo & conditioner solution. Why deal with providing a solution for replication and another solution layered on top for transaction ordering when you can do both together in less time with a unified solution?  TAPIR had investigated this question first, and Janus does a followup. Instead of using the general transaction model considered in TAPIR, Janus uses one shot transactions, where each transaction contains multiple pieces and each piece has one read/write operation on a single key.  This reduced power transaction model allows Janus to implement an abort-free transaction ordering capability. A novel insight in Janus is that it notices it is possible to consolidate replication ordering and transaction ordering using the same setup. To order the transactions and replication alike, Janus takes a dependency graph tracking approach, l
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Hints for Distributed Systems Design

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This is with apologies to Butler Lampson, who published the " Hints for computer system design " paper 40 years ago in SOSP'83. I don't claim to match that work of course. I just thought I could draft this post to organize my thinking about designing distributed systems and get feedback from others. I start with the same  disclaimer Lampson gave. These hints are not novel, not foolproof recipes, not laws of design, not precisely formulated, and not always appropriate. They are just hints.  They are context dependent, and some of them may be controversial. That being said, I have seen these hints successfully applied in distributed systems design throughout my 25 years in the field, starting from the theory of distributed systems (98-01), immersing into the practice of wireless sensor networks (01-11), and working on cloud computing systems both in the academia and industry ever since. These heuristic principles have been applied knowingly or unknowingly and has proven
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Learning about distributed systems: where to start?

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This is definitely not a "learn distributed systems in 21 days" post. I recommend a principled, from the foundations-up, studying of distributed systems, which will take a good three months in the first pass, and many more months to build competence after that. If you are practical and coding oriented you may not like my advice much. You may object saying, "Shouldn't I learn distributed systems with coding and hands on? Why can I not get started by deploying a Hadoop cluster, or studying the Raft code." I think that is the wrong way to go about learning distributed systems, because seeing similar code and programming language constructs will make you think this is familiar territory, and will give you a false sense of security. But, nothing can be further from the truth. Distributed systems need radically different software than centralized systems do.  --A. Tannenbaum This quotation is literally the first sentence in my distributed systems syllabus. Inst
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Making database systems usable

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C. J. Date's Sigmod 1983 keynote, "Database Usability", was prescient. Usability is the most important thing to the customers. They care less about impressive benchmarks or clever algorithms, and more about whether they can operate and use a database efficiently to query, update, analyze, and persist their data with minimal headache. (BTW, does anyone have a link to the contents of this Sigmod'83 talk? There is no transcript around, except for this short abstract .) The paper we cover today is from Sigmod 2007. It takes on the database usability problem raised in that 1983 keynote head-on, and calls out that the king is still naked.  Let's give some context for the year 2007. Yes, XML format was still popular then. The use-case in the paper is XQuery. The paper does not contain any  reference to json. MongoDB would be released in 2009 with the document model; and that seems to be great timing for some of the usability pains mentioned in the paper! Web 2.0 was in
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Looming Liability Machines (LLMs)

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As part of our zoom reading group ( wow, 4.5 years old now ), we discussed a paper that uses LLMs for automatic root cause analysis (RCA) for cloud incidents. This was a pretty straightforward application of LLMs. The proposed system employs an LLM to match incoming incidents to incident handlers based on their alert types, predicts the incident's root cause category, and provides an explanatory narrative. The only customization is through prompt-engineering. Since this is a custom domain, I think a more principled and custom-designed  machine learning system would be more appropriate rather than adopting LLMs. Anyways, the use of LLMs for RCAs spooked me vicerally. I couldn't find the exact words during the paper discussion, but I can articulate this better now. Let me explain. RCA is serious business Root cause analysis (RCA) is the process of identifying the underlying causes of a problem/incident, rather than just addressing its symptoms. One RCA heuristic is asking 5 Why&#
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Foundational distributed systems papers

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I talked about the importance of reading foundational papers last week. To followup, here is my compilation of foundational papers in the distributed systems area. (I focused on the core distributed systems area, and did not cover networking, security, distributed ledgers, verification work etc. I even left out distributed transactions, I hope to cover them at a later date.)  I classified the papers by subject, and listed them in chronological order. I also listed expository papers and blog posts at the end of each section. Time and State in Distributed Systems Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System. Leslie Lamport, Commn. of the ACM,  1978. Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of a Distributed System. K. Mani Chandy Leslie Lamport, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 1985. Virtual Time and Global States of Distributed Systems.  Mattern, F. 1988. Practical uses of synchronized clocks in distributed systems. B. Liskov, 1991. Expository papers
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Advice to the young

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I notice I haven't written any advice posts recently. Here is a collection of my advice posts pre 2020. I've been feeling all this elderly wisdom pent up in me, ready to pour at any moment. So here it goes. Get ready to quench your thirst from my fount of wisdom. No man, think for yourself, only get what works for you. It is called foundations, not theory Foundations of computer science (or rather any field of study) are the most important topics you can learn. These lay down the frame of thinking/perspective for that area of study. Yet, I am saddened to hear these called as "theory", and labeled as "unpractical". This couldn't be farther from the truth. Take a look at how I recommend studying distributed systems . Don't you dare call this "theory" and "unpractical". This lays the bedrock that you build your practice on. Don't skimp on the foundations. Don't build your home on quicksand. Keep your hands dirty, your mind cl
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Linearizability: A Correctness Condition for Concurrent Objects

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This paper is from Herlihy and Wing appeared in ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 1990. This is the canonical reference for the linearizability definition. I had not read this paper in detail before, so I thought it would be good to go to the source to see if there are additional delightful surprises in the original text. Hence, this post. I will dive into a technical analysis of the paper first, and then discuss some of my takes toward the end. I had written an accessible explanation of linearizability earlier; you may want to read that first. I will assume an understanding of linearizability to keep this review at reasonable length. Introduction I love how the old papers just barge in with the model, without bothered by pleasantries such as motivation of the problem. These are the first two sentences of the introduction. "A concurrent system consists of a collection of sequential processes that communicate through shared typed objects . This model encompass
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Scalable OLTP in the Cloud: What’s the BIG DEAL?

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This paper is from Pat Helland, the apostate philosopher of database systems, overall a superb person, and a good friend of mine. The paper appeared this week at CIDR'24. (Check out the program for other interesting papers). The motivating question behind this work is: " What are the asymptotic limits to scale for cloud OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) systems? " Pat says that the CIDR 2023 paper "Is Scalable OLTP in the Cloud a Solved Problem?" prompted this question.  The answer to the question? Pat says that the answer lies in the joint responsibility of database and the application. If you know of Pat's work, which I have summarized several in this blog , you would know that Pat has been advocating along these lines before. But this paper provides a very crisp, specific, concrete answer. Read on for my summary of the paper. Disclaimer: This is a wisdom and technical information/detail packed 13-page paper, so I will try my best to summarize the sa
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Understanding the Performance Implications of Storage-Disaggregated Databases

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Storage-compute disaggregation in databases has emerged as a pivotal architecture in cloud environments, as evidenced by Amazon ( Aurora ), Microsoft ( Socrates ), Google (AlloyDB), Alibaba ( PolarDB ), and Huawei (Taurus). This approach decouples compute from storage, allowing for independent and elastic scaling of compute and storage resources. It provides fault-tolerance at the storage level. You can then share the storage for other services, such as adding read-only replicas for the databases. You can even use the storage level for easier sharding of your database. Finally, you can also use this for exporting a changelog asynchronously to feed into peripheral cloud services, such as analytics. Disaggregated architecture was the topic of Sigmod 23 panel . I think this quote summarizes the industry's thinking on the topic. "Disaggregated architecture is here, and is not going anywhere. In a disaggregated architecture, storage is fungible, and computing scales independently.
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Designing Data Intensive Applications (DDIA) Book

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We started reading this book as part of Alex Petrov's book club . We just got started, so you can join us, by joining the discord channel above. We meet Wednesday's 11am Eastern Time.  Previously we had read transaction processing book by Grey and Reuters. This page links to my summaries of that book. Chp 1. Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications I love the diagrams opening each chapter. Beautiful! The first chapter consists of warm up stuff. It talks about the definitions of reliabilty, scalability, and maintainability. It is still engaging, because  it is written with an educator and technical blogger voice, rather than a dry academic voice. This book came out on 2017. Martin is working on the new version. So if you have comments for things to focus on for the new version, it would be helpful to collect them in a document and email it to Martin. For example, I am curious about how the below paragraph from the Preface will get revised with 8 more years of hindsight:
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