There's a lighter-weight introduction to the work here: https://www.amazon.science/blog/amazon-ebs-addresses-the-cha... and for those attending NSDI, I'll be talking about Physalia in the "Deployment Experience" session on Wednesday.
Probably tangential, but wanted to know what your thoughts are about the frequent case we often see where the interesting designs are made public without the actual implementation. e.g. the Map-Reduce paper-> Apache Hadoop. Dynamo-> Cassandra (and a few others), Spanner -> CockroachDB, Borg-> K8s etc.
Having worked at corporations most of my life, I know that internal systems often have a lot of internal dependencies which makes it really hard to open source them easily; often a refactor is more expensive than writing from scratch.
I can see it both ways; just wondering as the author, what your perspectives might be :).
Edit: I'm an idiot - https://www.amazon.science/publications/firecracker-lightwei...
- http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol12/p1747-ren.pdf
- https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/09/04/slog/
Any thoughts on this comparison?
The other different part of Physalia is our focus (again, for availability) on placement for 'blast radius'. That means we try limit the number of cells than any one failure (software, infrastructure, etc) can touch. Geo-replicated systems can have similar concerns, but I haven't seen the same level of focus on it as a key design goal.