DistOS 2019F 2019-11-04
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Readings
GFS & Chubby
- Sanjay Ghemawat et al., "The Google File System" (SOSP 2003)
- Burrows, The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems (OSDI 2006)
Discussion Questions
GFS
- What was the key task GFS was built for?
- What were the unusual design decisions made for GFS (i.e., how did they change semantics from UNIX-like filesystems)
- Why did those design decisions make sense given the task GFS was designed for?
- To what extent is GFS distributed? How is it centralized?
- How does GFS achieve fault tolerance and high performance?
- What are the different kinds of servers in GFS? What are their roles?
Chubby
- To what extent is Chubby like a UNIX filesystem? How does its semantics differ?
- Why does Chubby run on so few computers? Is it scalable?
- What is Paxos? What is it for? Why is it important to Chubby?
- What are the use cases for Chubby? How was it used with GFS?
Other
- Do you think Chubby and GFS are sufficient for Google today? Has anything changed in their use cases?
- Other thoughts or questions?