We're In Trouble, Computers Are Not Helping

James Mickens, Microsoft Research, Distributed System Group

MapReduce: boring...zzzzzzzz

Cloud is dirty underneath...

Unmodified POSIX/Win32 applications running with cloud scale I/O performance

App
--------------------------
Blizzard virtual drive
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Disks

1. Delayed durability semantics: flush is an order semantic only, not durability semantic anymore
2. How to avoid buffer a lot of data: treat back storage as a distributed log, and only checkpoint up to the durability point

Now:
All previous writes are durable
All after writes are not durable (which is nice...)

But still, it might be impossible to have the cloud work

Security: government is more powerful than you give it credit for.  Using cryptography is kind like using a gun to defend against the government....

Cloud Security:
Even if you encrypt all your data, cloud provider could still monitor your computation (search and fetch, etc.) and derive correlations.