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We propose the Write-Once Register (WOR) as an abstraction for building and verifying distributed systems. A WOR exposes a simple, data-centric API: clients can capture, write, and read it. Applications can use a sequence or a set of WORs to obtain properties such as durability, concurrency control, and failure atomicity. By hiding the logic for distributed coordination underneath a data-centric API, the WOR abstraction enables easy, incremental, and extensible implementation and verification of applications built above it. We present the design, implementation, and verification of a system called WormSpace that provides developers with an address space of WORs, implementing each WOR via a Paxos instance. We describe three applications built over WormSpace: a flexible, efficient Multi-Paxos implementation; a shared log implementation with lower append latency than the state-of-the-art; and a fault-tolerant transaction coordinator that uses an optimal number of round-trips. We show that these applications are simple, easy to verify, and match the performance of unverified monolithic implementations. We use a modular layered verification approach to link the proofs for WormSpace, its applications, and a verified operating system to produce the first verified distributed system stack from the application to the operating system. 

The FuzzyLog is a partially ordered shared log abstraction. Distributed applications can concurrently append to the partial order and play it back. FuzzyLog applications obtain the benefits of an underlying shared log --- extracting strong consistency, durability, and failure atomicity in simple ways --- without suffering from its drawbacks. By exposing a partial order, the FuzzyLog enables three key capabilities for applications: linear scaling for throughput and capacity (without sacrificing atomicity), weaker consistency guarantees, and tolerance to network partitions. We present Dapple, a distributed implementation of the FuzzyLog abstraction that stores the partial order compactly and supports efficient appends / playback via a new ordering protocol. We implement several data structures and applications over the FuzzyLog, including several map variants as well as a ZooKeeper implementation. Our evaluation shows that these applications are compact, fast, and flexible: they retain the simplicity (100s of lines of code) and strong semantics (durability and failure atomicity) of a shared log design while exploiting the partial order of the FuzzyLog for linear scalability, flexible consistency guarantees (e.g., causal+ consistency), and network partition tolerance. On a 6-node Dapple deployment, our FuzzyLogbased ZooKeeper supports 3M/sec single-key writes, and 150K/sec atomic cross-shard renames. 

The FuzzyLog is a partially ordered shared log abstraction. Distributed applications can concurrently append to the partial order and play it back. FuzzyLog applications obtain the benefits of an underlying shared log - extracting strong consistency, durability, and failure atomicity in simple ways - without suffering from its drawbacks. By exposing a partial order, the FuzzyLog enables three key capabilities for applications: linear scaling for throughput and capacity (without sacrificing atomicity), weaker consistency guarantees, and tolerance to network partitions. We present Dapple, a distributed implementation of the FuzzyLog abstraction that stores the partial order compactly and supports efficient appends / playback via a new ordering protocol. We implement several data structures and applications over the FuzzyLog, including several map variants as well as a ZooKeeper implementation. Our evaluation shows that these applications are compact, fast, and flexible: they retain the simplicity (100s of lines of code) and strong semantics (durability and failure atomicity) of a shared log design while exploiting the partial order of the FuzzyLog for linear scalability, flexible consistency guarantees (e.g., causal+ consistency), and network partition tolerance. On a 6-node Dapple deployment, our FuzzyLog-based ZooKeeper supports 3M/sec single-key writes, and 150K/sec atomic cross-shard renames. 

Storage systems are designed to never lose data. However, modern applications increasingly use local storage to improve performance by storing soft state such as cached, prefetched or precomputed results. Required is elastic storage, where cloud providers can alter the storage footprint of applications by removing and regenerating soft state based on resource availability and access patterns. We propose a new abstraction called a motif that enables storage elasticity by allowing applications to describe how soft state can be regenerated. Carillon is a system that uses motifs to dynamically change the storage space used by applications. Carillon is implemented as a runtime and a collection of shim layers that interpose between applications and specific storage APIs; we describe shims for a filesystem (Carillon-FS) and a key-value store (Carillon-KV). We show that Carillon-FS allows us to dynamically alter the storage footprint of a VM, while Carillon-KV enables a graph database that accelerates performance based on available storage space