Re:Fast key-value stores: An idea whose time has come and gone
by btown on Monday June 24, 2019 @01:29PM
(#20266050)
So the crux of this paper is "if you have perfect auto-sharding as a service, it's better to cut out a middleman and have it shard stateful app servers, rather than just sharding a KV store layer." In many ways, this paper is an extension of the 2016 paper it references, which introduces their internal sharding-as-a-service, Slicer: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi16/osdi16...
Once you separate out Slicer, this result is pretty obvious in theory - in fact, in that Slicer paper they mention machine learning as a driving example, where it absolutely makes sense to colocate application logic with user-specific models cached in memory.
Honestly, this paper, with its one-paragraph implementation section, reads almost like clickbait - "let's say something controversial, release an un-reproducable paper that adds very little to the literature besides 'this is something cool you can do if you have a tool only Google has,' btw do you want to work for Google?" The Slicer paper itself has much more detail and IMO is a much better read.
Once you separate out Slicer, this result is pretty obvious in theory - in fact, in that Slicer paper they mention machine learning as a driving example, where it absolutely makes sense to colocate application logic with user-specific models cached in memory.
Honestly, this paper, with its one-paragraph implementation section, reads almost like clickbait - "let's say something controversial, release an un-reproducable paper that adds very little to the literature besides 'this is something cool you can do if you have a tool only Google has,' btw do you want to work for Google?" The Slicer paper itself has much more detail and IMO is a much better read.