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We present 3MileBeach, a tracing and fault injection platform designed for microservice-based architectures. 3Mile-Beach interposes on the message serialization libraries that are ubiquitous in this environment, avoiding the application code instrumentation that tracing and fault injection infrastructures typically require. 3MileBeach provides message-level distributed tracing at less than 50% of the overhead of the state-of-the-art tracing frameworks, and fault injection that allows higher precision experiments than existing solutions. We measure the overhead of 3MileBeach as a tracer and its efficacy as a fault injector. We qualitatively measure its promise as a platform for tuning and debugging by sharing concrete use cases in the context of bottleneck identification, performance tuning, and bug finding. Finally, we use 3MileBeach to perform a novel type of fault injection - Temporal Fault Injection (TFI), which more precisely controls individual inter-service message flow with temporal prerequisites, and makes it possible to catch an entirely new class of fault tolerance bugs. 

In the post-Moore era, systems and devices with new architectures will arrive at a rapid rate with significant impacts on the software stack. Applications will not be able to fully benefit from new architectures unless they can delegate adapting to new devices in lower layers of the stack. In this paper we introduce physical design management which deals with the problem of identifying and executing transformations on physical designs of stored data, i.e. how data is mapped to storage abstractions like files, objects, or blocks, in order to improve performance. Physical design is traditionally placed with applications, access libraries, and databases, using hard- wired assumptions about underlying storage systems. Yet, storage systems increasingly not only contain multiple kinds of storage devices with vastly different performance profiles but also move data among those storage devices, thereby changing the benefit of a particular physical design. We advocate placing physical design management in storage, identify interesting research challenges, provide a brief description of a prototype implementation in Ceph, and discuss the results of initial experiments at scale that are replicable using Cloudlab. These experiments show performance and resource utilization trade-offs associated with choosing different physical designs and choosing to transform between physical designs.