DistOS 2019F 2019-11-18

Readings

Haystack & F4

• Beaver et al., "Finding a needle in Haystack: Facebook’s photo storage" (OSDI 2010)
• Muralidhar et al., "f4: Facebook's Warm BLOB Storage System" (OSDI 2014)

Discussion Questions

• What are the key characteristics of the problem Haystack and F4 are trying to solve?
• How does this workload compare to that of a general-purpose data store?
• How do both systems provide performance and reliability?
• To what extent is concurrency a major concern in the design of these systems?
• How is F4 an optimization on top of what Haystack provides?
• What were the key algorithms and data structures used by both systems?