[talks] Fwd: Jude Nelson FPO TODAY May 22, 2018 2:00 pm - CS402

[Barbara A. Mooring]

Jude Nelson will present his FPO TODAY, May 22, 2018 at 2:00 pm in CS402.

Committee:

Larry Peterson, Adviser - Princeton University
Kai Li - Princeton University
Brian Kernighan - Princeton University
John H. Hartman - University of Arizona

All are welcomed to attend.

Title:  Wide-area Software-defined Storage

Abstract:

The proliferation of commodity cloud services helps developers build wide-area
\system-of-systems" applications by harnessing cloud storage, CDNs, and public
datasets as reusable building blocks. But to do so, developers must contend with
two long-term challenges. First, whenever developers change storage providers, they
must work to preserve the application's expected storage semantics, i.e. the rules
governing how the application expects the storage provider to handle its reads and
writes. Today, changing storage providers is costly, because developers need to patch
the application to make it compatible with the new provider's data consistency
model, access controls, replica placement strategies, and so on.

At the same time, users have certain expectations about how their data will be
used, which the application must meet. For example, depending on the application,
users may expect that their data will be kept private from other users, that their data
will be exportable to other applications, that accesses to their data will be logged in
an auditable way, and so on. In the limit, each user's expectations represent an
implicit policy constraining how their data can be stored. Honoring these policies is
dicult for developers who rely on third-party storage providers because the storage
provider is often unaware of them.

This thesis addresses these challenges with a wide-area storage protocol, called
\software-dened storage" (SDS), that runs in-between applications and cloud services.
SDS-enabled applications do not host data, but instead let users bring their
preferred cloud services to the application. By taking a user-centric approach to
hosting data, users are empowered to programmatically specify their policies independent
of their applications and select services that will honor them. To support
this approach and to tolerate service provider changes, SDS empowers developers to
programmatically specify their application's storage semantics independent of storage
providers.

This thesis presents the design principles for SDS, and validates their real-world
applicability with two SDS implementations and several non-trivial applications built
on top of them. Most of these applications are used in production today. This thesis
presents early performance results of its SDS implementations and uses real-world
experiences to show how to make the most of SDS.

Barbara A. Mooring
Interim Graduate Coordinator
Computer Science Department
Princeton University