Reading Group Special Session: Building Distributed Systems With Stateright

This talk is part of the Distributed Systems Reading Group.

Stateright is a software framework for analyzing and systematically verifying distributed systems. Its name refers to its goal of verifying that a system’s collective state always satisfies a correctness specification, such as “operations invoked against the system are always linearizable.” Cloud service providers like AWS and Azure leverage verification software such as the TLA+ model checker to achieve the same goal, but whereas that solution can verify a high level system design, Stateright is able to systematically verify the underlying system implementation in addition to the design.

In this talk, Stateright’s author Jonathan Nadal will introduce the project, demo its usage, and discuss upcoming improvements. Jonathan has been in the cloud space since 2012 when he joined Amazon Web Services to work on S3. There he met Chris Newcombe, who introduced TLA+ to the company, and was immediately hooked by that technology. Jonathan later joined Oracle to help build Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, where he is currently a director of engineering and a proponent of model checking techniques within and outside his own teams. Stateright is a personal project not affiliated with Oracle or Amazon.

Video Recording

Reading Group

Our reading group takes place over Zoom every Wednesday at 2:00 pm EST. We have a slack group where we post papers, hold discussions, and most importantly manage Zoom invites to paper discussions. Please join the slack group to get involved!