Reading Group

Welcome to the DistSys Reading Group! Every week we present and discuss one distributed systems paper. We try to focus on relatively new papers, although we occasionally break this rule for some important older publications. The main objective of this group is to share knowledge through discussion. Our participants come from academia and industry and often carry a unique perspective and expertise on the subject matter.

Format

We start each meeting with a short presentation of the paper by one of the group members. We record the presentation and later upload it to YouTube for the general audience. After the presentation, we move into a group discussion of the paper. This part is not on the record to make sure we can speak freely about the topic and the paper. However, I write a moderated discussion summary for each meeting and post it here. All the summaries are available via the “Summary” link next to the paper title. To see the archive of past meetings, scroll down to the “Past Meetings” section below.

Meeting Info

Current Schedule (Papers ##111-120)

Below is a list of papers for the fall term of the distributed systems reading group.

Past Meetings

Past Special Sessions

  1. Building Distributed Systems With StaterightMarch 30th @ 1pm EST – Jon Nadal.
  2. Distributed Transactions in YugabyteDBMay 11th @12pm EST – Karthik Ranganathan.
  3. Fast General Purpose Transactions in Apache Cassandra – February 9thth @ 2 pm EST – Benedict Elliott Smith
  4. Scalability and Fault Tolerance in YDBAugust 10th @ 2pm EST – Andrey Fomichev

Recent Reading Group Meetings

Reading Group. DeepScaling: microservices autoscaling for stable CPU utilization in large scale cloud systems

In the 127th meeting, we discussed the “DeepScaling: microservices autoscaling for stable CPU utilization in large scale cloud systems” SoCC’22 paper by Ziliang Wang, Shiyi Zhu, Jianguo Li, Wei Jiang, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Yangfei Zheng, Meng Yan, Xiaohong Zhang, Alex X. Liu. This paper argues that current Autoscaling solutions for Microservice applications are lacking in […]

Reading Group. How to fight production incidents?: an empirical study on a large-scale cloud service

In the 125th reading group meeting, we looked at the reliability of cloud services. In particular, we read the “How to fight production incidents?: an empirical study on a large-scale cloud service” SoCC’22 paper by Supriyo Ghosh, Manish Shetty, Chetan Bansal, and Suman Nath. This paper looks at 152 severe production incidents in the Microsoft […]

Reading Group. Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service

In the 120th DistSys meeting, we talked about “Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service” ATC’22 paper by Mostafa Elhemali, Niall Gallagher, Nicholas Gordon, Joseph Idziorek, Richard Krog, Colin Lazier, Erben Mo, Akhilesh Mritunjai, Somu Perianayagam, Tim Rath, Swami Sivasubramanian, James Christopher Sorenson III, Sroaj Sosothikul, Doug Terry, Akshat Vig. […]

Reading Group. The Case for Distributed Shared-Memory Databases with RDMA-Enabled Memory Disaggregation

In the 122nd reading group meeting, we read “The Case for Distributed Shared-Memory Databases with RDMA-Enabled Memory Disaggregation” paper by Ruihong Wang, Jianguo Wang, Stratos Idreos, M. Tamer Özsu, Walid G. Aref. This paper looks at the trend of resource disaggregation in the cloud and asks whether distributed shared memory databases (DSM-DBs) can benefit from […]

Reading Group. Not that Simple: Email Delivery in the 21st Century

I haven’t been posting new reading group paper summaries lately, but I intend to fix that gap and resume writing these. Our 123rd paper was about email: “Not that Simple: Email Delivery in the 21st Century” by Florian Holzbauer, Johanna Ullrich, Martina Lindorfer, and Tobias Fiebig. This paper studies whether different emerging standards and technologies impact email delivery […]

Fall Term Reading Group Papers: ##111-120

Below is a list of papers for the fall term of the distributed systems reading group. The list is also on the reading group’s Google Calendar. Metastable Failures in the Wild [OSDI’22] Authors: Lexiang Huang, Matthew Magnusson, Abishek Bangalore Muralikrishna, Salman Estyak, Rebecca Isaacs, Abutalib Aghayev, Timothy Zhu, Aleksey Charapko What: An exploration of many […]

Reading Group Special Session: Scalability and Fault Tolerance in YDB

YDB is an open-source Distributed SQL Database. YDB is used as an OLTP Database for mission-critical user-facing applications. It provides strong consistency and serializable transaction isolation for the end user. One of the main characteristics of YDB is scalability to very large clusters together with multitenancy, i.e. ability to provide an isolated user environment for […]

Reading Group. Achieving High Throughput and Elasticity in a Larger-than-Memory Store

“Achieving High Throughput and Elasticity in a Larger-than-Memory Store” paper by Chinmay Kulkarni, Badrish Chandramouli, and Ryan Stutsman discusses elastic, scalable distributed storage. The paper proposes Shadowfax, an extension to the FASTER single-node KV-store. The particular use case targeted by Shadowfax is the ingestion of large volumes of (streaming) data. The system does not appear […]