Blog Posts

2018

• 20 Jun 2018    Telling Stories About Little's Law
• 25 Feb 2018    Availability and availability
• 01 Jan 2018    Balls Into Bins In Distributed Systems

2017

• 28 Dec 2017    Is the Mean Really Useless?

2016

• 03 Jan 2016    Why Must Systems Be Operated?

2015

• 05 Nov 2015    Heuristic Traps for Systems Operators
• 26 Sep 2015    Is there a CAP theorem for Durability?
• 20 Jun 2015    CALISDO: Threat Modeling for Distributed Designs
• 24 May 2015    Sodium Carbonate, and Ramenized Pasta
• 11 Apr 2015    The Zero, One, Infinity Disease
• 29 Mar 2015    How Amazon Web Services Uses Formal Methods
• 21 Mar 2015    Jitter: Making Things Better With Randomness
• 03 Mar 2015    Electoral Trouble in Sybilania
• 28 Feb 2015    Does Bitcoin Solve Byzantine Consensus?
• 25 Jan 2015    A Quiet Defense of Patterns

2014

• 06 Dec 2014    Make Your Program Slower With Threads
• 30 Nov 2014    Two Farmers and Common Knowledge
• 15 Nov 2014    Exactly-Once Delivery May Not Be What You Want
• 25 Oct 2014    Ice Cream and Distributed Systems
• 12 Oct 2014    Harvest and Yield: Not A Natural Cure for Tradeoff Confusion
• 21 Sep 2014    The Essential Barbara Liskov
• 10 Aug 2014    The Space Between Theory and Practice in Distributed Systems
• 09 Aug 2014    Use of Formal Methods at Amazon Web Services
• 16 Jul 2014    CAP and PACELC: Thinking More Clearly About Consistency
• 04 Jul 2014    Two traps in iostat: %util and svctm
• 29 Jun 2014    The Operations Gradient: Improving Safety in Complex Systems
• 19 May 2014    Viewstamped Replication: The Less-Famous Consensus Protocol
• 10 May 2014    The Essential Nancy Lynch
• 14 Apr 2014    Failure Detectors, and Non-Blocking Atomic Commit
• 30 Mar 2014    The Essential Leslie Lamport
• 08 Mar 2014    Snark, Chord, and Trust in Algorithms
• 12 Jan 2014    Distributed Consensus: Beating Impossibility with Probability One

2013

• 16 Dec 2013    Restricted Transactional Memory on Haswell
• 14 Dec 2013    Hardware Lock Elision on Haswell
• 14 Jul 2013    Beyond iostat: Storage performance analysis with blktrace
• 25 May 2013    Some Patterns of Engineering Design Meetings
• 20 Jan 2013    Exploring TLA+ with two-phase commit
• 06 Jan 2013    C++11's atomic and volatile, under the hood on x86

2012

• 13 Nov 2012    Java's Atomic and volatile, under the hood on x86
• 10 Sep 2012    Are volatile reads really free?
• 10 Sep 2012    Highly contended and fair locking in Java
• 02 Sep 2012    Expect Less, Get More?
• 11 Feb 2012    Latency lags bandwidth
• 22 Jan 2012    The properties of crash-only software
• 17 Jan 2012    The power of two random choices
• 10 Jan 2012    The benefits of having data