Summary:
In this paper the author talks about lessons learnt from giant-scale services. This includes: the model, high availibility and its different metrics, and updates and growth.
Important Ideas/Strength:
I believe the focus on availability metrics and their importance to giant-scale services was key. Not only explaining each metric in detail, the author emphasizes that uptime is not enough for these type of systems. Yield and harvest are more important. A figure such as 0.9999 uptime could be misleading because the 0.0001 downtime could be during the peak period.
Flaws/Advance Since Publication:
The author describes upgrades and changes to these services as controlled failures to the service. It could be that some of the cases weren't avoidable at the time. Nowadays, these failures could be avoided. With the advances in load balancing solutions and virtualization of servers/software these failures can be reduced if planned properly.
I just wanted to add really quick that this is more like the format for a summary that we are look for when you guys do these blog posts.
ReplyDeleteWhen reading papers it is normally useful to write down a summary of about a page. Your summary should include at least:
- Paper title (I'd suggest making this the title of the post)
- Brief one-line summary (What is the contribution/takeaway of the paper). Put this in your own words.
- A paragraph of the most important ideas: perhaps a combination of their motivations, observations, interesting parts of the design, or clever parts of their implementation.
- A paragraph of the largest flaws; maybe an experiment was poorly designed or the main idea had a narrow scope or applicability. Being able to assess weaknesses as well as strengths is an important skill for this course and beyond.
- A last paragraph where you state the relevance of the ideas today, potential future research suggested by the article, etc.